Banking as a Service (BaaS) is revolutionising the finance sector. BaaS enables non-financial companies to provide customers with financial products and services such as personal loans, credit cards and digital savings accounts. It leverages the expertise and experience of trusted banks, such as Standard Chartered, so they can offer a wider range of services to existing and new customers.
When Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak wanted to provide their customers with access to financial services, they partnered with Standard Chartered to launch BukaTabungan, which is powered by Standard Chartered nexus (SC nexus) BaaS platform. While SC nexus already had a footprint on AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region, it had not yet migrated to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.
Sourced Group an Amdocs Company (Sourced), migrated SC nexus’ digital banking platform from AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) within a tight timeframe. SC nexus was planning to make that migration by 2025. But to meet the needs and regulatory compliance of Bukalapak, that migration was brought forward. And while this migration typically takes about a year, Sourced completed the migration of the workload which was spread across four AWS EKS clusters coordinating 103 EC2 instances across three availability zones in just nine months. The accompanying data migration included eight PostgreSQL clusters and data sync for a Cassandra cluster and two Amazon S3 buckets.
As well as enabling Bukalapak to achieve its objectives, being able to offer BaaS from Indonesia broadens SC nexus’ market reach.
The migration was complex as not all the required AWS services were available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. At the time of migration, Sourced needed to develop robust and compliant solutions as Kinesis Analytics, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS EKS and GPU instances were not available in the AWS Jakarta region.
Sourced’s expertise and deep knowledge of cloud services was a valuable asset in this complex migration. For example, the company was able to architect an automated solution for the data migration. This was a crucial factor that enabled the migration, that took nine months of preparation and planning, to be successfully completed in just eight hours.
The partnership between Sourced and SC nexus has supported and enabled Standard Chartered’s strategic priority of scaling up its mass retail presence through innovative partnerships and generating new revenue streams through digital initiatives. Being able to meet customers’ needs, such as those of Bukalapak proves that it is possible to offer reliable, robust and secure BaaS offerings that take into account the needs for data sovereignty and differing regulatory requirements.
Sourced has expertise in most major cloud platforms offered across the world. The partnership with SC nexus, which has grown over several years, has given SC nexus first-mover advantage in several countries. For example, Indonesia is one of the world’s largest emerging markets with almost 200 million internet users. The partnership with Sourced means SC nexus can offer BaaS in country with onshore services through AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) that are compliant with local laws and regulations.
Similarly, it can also do the same in Singapore as well as many of the over 30 markets Standard Chartered already operates in. With a proven track record in making SC nexus available in multiple regions through the partnership with Sourced, Standard Chartered has a platform that can grow beyond the Asia Pacific region and offer compliant BaaS across the world.
BaaS gives businesses that are looking for new services they can offer to customers a high-value service. And while banking has been extremely difficult to break into because of the high cost of establishing systems and licensing and maintaining regulatory compliance SC nexus enables businesses to offer banking services through a trusted banking partner. Sourced has enabled SC nexus to expand its reach across the Asia Pacific region and beyond.
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