Financial institution Bancolombia has selected AWS as its strategic cloud partner with plans to migrate 100% of its applications to increase its availability and reduce the possibility of service interruption.
Amazon Web Services, part of Amazon.com, has announced that the transnational financial institution Bancolombia is expanding its relationship with AWS, selecting it as its strategic cloud partner with plans to migrate 100% of its applications to the world’s leading cloud.
As part of a new agreement, Bancolombia will move the majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS, and it expects to reduce its IT infrastructure costs by approximately 60%.
For the last three years, Bancolombia has modernized and transformed its digital channels and applications, such as ‘Bancolombia a la Mano’ on AWS to improve the banking experience for its more than 20 million individual and corporate customers in Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, the Cayman Islands, Peru and Guatemala. So far, the bank has migrated its SAP workloads and more than 90 applications to AWS and created 180 new applications natively in the cloud.
The bank is leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure and a broad portfolio of cloud capabilities, including analytics, databases, storage and security, to lower costs and improve its operational efficiency. In addition, the financial institution’s top management is investing in cloud computing skills development for its employees to accelerate the company’s Digital Transformation. To date, 800 employees have completed cloud computing training through AWS courses.
“Using AWS will allow us to continue advancing in the Digital Transformation we have been undergoing. This is a clear sign of wanting to give customers the best experience in their relationship with us,” said Jaime Villegas, Vice President of Corporate Services at Bancolombia.
“Moving to the cloud, helps us promote sustainable economic development to achieve wellbeing for all. In our view, technology is key to delivering quality, financial and non-financial products and services to the customers and communities we serve. By leveraging the cloud, we can remain at the forefront and continue to be a benchmark of innovation for the financial sector.”
The relationship between the two companies began in 2015, when Nequi, the first digital bank in Colombia, part of Grupo Bancolombia, was created. Following a period of success in 2018, Bancolombia decided to open a new management team in charge of leading its Digital Transformation process. It considered the adoption of cloud services a priority. Thus, using AWS services, the financial institution successfully migrated applications, including the SAP software’s planning resources, to the cloud.
Bancolombia is using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a managed relational database service, to develop scalable applications that meet the company’s internal needs. Thanks to this tool, the bank can free itself from arduous and time-consuming administrative tasks. In addition, the bank currently uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to take advantage of container technology in an immersive way and can control the newly created containers. To date, the bank has dozens of EKS clusters, which enable it to provide more security and higher availability by automating key tasks such as patching, node provisioning and updates.
“With the migration to the cloud, we’re improving the performance of the bank’s operation from several points of view. Bancolombia sees cloud services as an enabler with a global, secure and resilient network that allows the company to improve its processes to create a digital environment,” said Marcos Grilanda, Regional Director of AWS.
“This financial institution relies on AWS’s proven performance, scale and an unmatched portfolio of capabilities to complete its transformation, which will help them continue to innovate new services well into the future,” he concluded.
About Grupo Bancolombia
Bancolombia is a financial group with 146 years of history, and a presence in Colombia and Central America. It offers its portfolio of financial and non-financial products and services to more than 20 million customers. It provides, among others, commercial and consumer banking services, stock brokerage, financial leasing, factoring, trust services, asset management, private banking and investment banking. It has announced it will promote economic development for the well-being of all, seeking to impact the communities of the four countries in which it operates.
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform. AWS has been continuously expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload and now has more than 200 full-featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybridization, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR and AR), media and application development, deployment and management from 81 Availability Zones in 25 geographic regions worldwide.
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