Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Trust Bank: Building for scale while enhancing the customer experience (FSI315)

Summary

Trust Bank is the first digital bank in Singapore, a partnership between Standard Chartered and NTUC Fairprice.
Launched on September 1, 2022, Trust Bank quickly grew to 500,000 customers and over 12% market penetration in Singapore.
Key foundations of success include scale, real-time data for customer transactions, and speed of execution.
The bank's architecture is built around Thought Machine, which is headless and interacts via APIs, with microservices designed for real-time event listening and response.
Trust Bank is 100% containerized, with less than 100 engineers operating the platform.
They use AWS services extensively, including EKS for compute, with nine clusters in production, and have plans for architectural upgrades.
Trust Bank migrated from RDS PostgreSQL to Aurora PostgreSQL for improved resiliency, cost optimization, and IO performance.
Their real-time event streaming platform and data lake are built using AWS native data services, with Kafka messages streamed to S3 and processed by Apache Airflow.
Trust Bank focuses on reliability, observability, and developer experience, using AWS Fault Injection Service for resiliency testing and Backstage for a unified developer interface.
They have implemented a security use case with AWS AppStream for ephemeral access to databases.
Trust Bank has significantly reduced customer acquisition costs and improved onboarding speed, with 70% of acquisitions coming from referral programs.

Trust Bank's rapid growth and market penetration demonstrate the potential for digital banks to disrupt traditional banking, even in saturated markets like Singapore.
The bank's focus on real-time data and instant gratification aligns with modern consumer expectations set by services like Uber and Airbnb.
Trust Bank's architecture emphasizes scalability and efficiency, with a small engineering team managing a large-scale operation, highlighting the importance of automation and containerization.
The migration to Aurora PostgreSQL shows a strategic move to leverage AWS's managed services for better performance and cost savings.
Trust Bank's use of AWS Fault Injection Service for orchestrated multi-account resiliency testing is an innovative approach to ensuring high availability and meeting regulatory SLAs.
The bank's developer experience initiatives, such as the shift-left strategy and the use of Backstage, indicate a strong commitment to enabling independent and efficient microservice delivery.
Trust Bank's security use case with AWS AppStream for database access showcases a creative solution for balancing operational needs with security and compliance requirements.
The bank's customer acquisition and onboarding metrics suggest that their technology investments are translating into significant business advantages.