Bankwest sends broker site to the public cloud with AWS Lambda

Bankwest has revealed the security gateway for its Broker Portal is running wholly in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

Launched in July, the bank's new "one-stop-shop" allows brokers to track the real-time status and other information on current home loan applications, as well as the monitoring of existing loans.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned organisation touted the move to Lambda as one providing "higher degrees of automation", with Bankwest engineering manager Chris Dorrington commenting the shift to the cloud has also seen a greater investment in security and risk control features.

"The serverless architecture is part of a shift towards automated preventative and corrective controls. These levels of automation strengthen our risk management overall," Dorrington said in a statement.

"A mantra of ours is 'compliance as code' -- from the provisioning of development environments to the continual testing of the cloud infrastructure, we're able to continuously prove compliance with our security model."

Speaking of the bank's "cloud-first", company-wide transformation, Bankwest CTO Sean Langton said AWS Lambda, and serverless computing in general, highlights the company's push to become "agile and responsive to rapidly-changing customer needs".

The CTO said Bankwest's in-house teams are going from idea to production within a week or two, rather than months.

"By investing in a world-class cloud-native platform, we're keeping our developers happy because they're using the latest technologies and we're delighting our customers with innovative products and features being delivered quickly," Langton said.

As a cloud native platform allows the handoff from one department to another to be automated, Langton also said the bank has managed to significantly reduce the time for a product to get to market.

"With the basic compute infrastructure and automation taken care of, our people can spend more time on value-adding initiatives, rather than patching and manually maintaining an eclectic mix of technologies," he added.

The broker security gateway is Bankwest's first release on the platform, but the bank has said this will be followed by two more projects going online before the end of the calendar year.

Earlier this year, Bankwest technical product owner for APIs, Services Engineering, Enterprise Services Rob Crowley told ZDNet the banking sector now finds itself in a position where it needs to continually evolve and adapt to meet changing customer needs and community expectations.

"Banking used to be about product and price, whereas now our focus at Bankwest is on delivering customer experiences, particularly through digital channels," he said.

"Digital is now ubiquitous and this has driven higher expectations for what represents a truly great customer experience. In the face of this sweeping wave of change, it will not be the company that has the perfect strategy at a given point in time that will survive, but rather the ones who can react quickly to changing customer demands.

"Effectively, it will be a case of survival of the most adaptable, and technology will play a key part in enabling that."

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