Al Rajhi Malaysia’s digital bank, Rize, picks AWS as their sole cloud provider

• Al Rajhi Bank picks AWS as the sole cloud provider for its digital bank Rize and will migrate all critical IT infrastructure to AWS by 2026.
• Several AWS products and services, including containers, databases, and compute to deliver innovative financial services, will be leveraged for Rize.

In December 2022, Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the world’s largest Islamic bank, officially launched Rize, a digital bank for its Malaysian customers. Considering the demand is there in Malaysia for faster and easier online banking, Al Rajhi Bank announced that it had picked Amazon Web Service (AWS) for Rize, as the digital bank seeks an agile, scalable, resilient, and secure cloud environment.

To meet local regulatory requirements while rapidly developing and implementing a user-friendly digital bank for consumers and businesses, Al Rajhi Bank, shared that Rize is going all-in on AWS, the cloud arm of tech giant Amazon. “Al Rajhi bank Malaysia, a subsidiary of the world’s largest Islamic bank by assets, will migrate its key IT infrastructure to AWS by 2026,” the statement reads.

Adding to that, Al Rajhi said it would adopt a few products and services of AWS, including containers, databases, and compute, to deliver innovative financial services for Rize, which is available via a smartphone app. The bank also noted that it is building digital banking products for Rize using microservices with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS.

“With Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a fully managed, open-source cloud database service, Al Rajh bank can easily use customer data sets to enable more personalized services, like payment services, as it evolves Rize,” the bank added.

 “With AWS, we were able to quickly build Rize, a mobile-first, highly scalable digital bank offering a seamless customer experience, within 12 months from conception to reality,” said Arsalaan (Oz) Ahmed, chief executive officer at Al Rajhi bank Malaysia. “AWS gives us the agility and confidence to deliver new innovative banking services with Rize that meet local regulatory requirements, helping Rizers better manage their finances.”

Conor McNamara, managing director at AWS in ASEAN, noted that AWS is helping more local organizations accelerate innovation using cloud technology to deliver financial services to Malaysians. “With AWS, Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia (via Rize) is meeting the rising demand for mobile banking solutions that drive financial inclusion while improving customers’ financial well-being,” he added.

When Rize launched three months ago, it hit the ground running with the standard services banks provide – deposits, withdrawals, transfers, account management, personal finance management, debit card application, purchase and maintenance, ATM services, and e-statements, as well as personal financing.

“With AWS, we were able to quickly build Rize, a mobile-first, highly scalable digital bank offering a seamless customer experience within 12 months from conception to reality. AWS gives us the agility and confidence to deliver new innovative banking services with Rize that meet local regulatory requirements,” said Arsalaan (Oz) Ahmed, CEO of Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia.

The collaboration announcement came on the heels of AWS’s plans to launch an AWS infrastructure Region in Malaysia. The new AWS Region is to provide its customers the ability to run their applications and serve end users from data centers in Malaysia. The commitment will be supported by a US$6 billion investment in Malaysia through 2037.

Even regionally, AWS has been clenching more deals in the financial services industry as neo-banks and traditional banks embrace cloud services amidst a digital banking wave. To top it off, according to IDC’s Banking Cloud Trends in Asia/Pacific in 2022 report, 92% of banks in Asia Pacific plan to increase their cloud spending this year.

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