About Customer

Launched in September of 2022, Trust Bank is the first of Singapore’s new wave of digital banks. It is also one of the fastest growing digital banks in the world with 16 percent of Singapore’s market share, or more than 800,000 customers. To keep pace with its rapid growth, Trust Bank needed an agile continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution that could seamlessly integrate with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments at scale. Following a careful evaluation, Trust Bank turned to AWS Partner Harness. With Harness fully integrated, Trust Bank reduced its lead time for deployment from two weeks to 24 hours and achieved continuous compliance through implementing all controls required to align with industry standards.

Challenges

Built on AWS and using containerized applications, Trust Bank is a fully digital bank, with an incredibly fast customer onboarding journey of under three minutes. Efficient, modern, and customer-focused, Trust Bank’s rapid growth has enabled it to acquire more than 800,000 customers in less than two years. This impressive growth, typical of cloud-native financial institutions, allowed it to achieve a market penetration of sixteen percent in Singapore.

To maintain its pace of innovation, Trust Bank needed a more agile, streamlined cloud infrastructure that could replace manual, multi-step compliance, risk, and security verification processes. Prior to working with Harness, even a simple code change could take up to two weeks to pass through various manual checks by multiple stakeholders. "Speed and agility are critical to us, but so is maintaining the trust we’ve built with our customers. We needed to find a way to keep delivering updates quickly while ensuring everything met the necessary security and compliance standards," said Srinivas Patil, chief technology officer at Trust Bank. Streamlining this process became essential for Trust Bank to reduce friction in its development pipeline, while upholding its commitment to safety and regulatory compliance.

Solution

After careful evaluation, Trust Bank selected Harness because its container-native CI/CD server enables developers to continuously test, build, and deploy code changes on-demand. Leveraging AI across the entire software delivery lifecycle, Harness empowers teams to transform how they work regardless of size or location. For Trust Bank, working with Harness was a breeze. It took about one month for Trust Bank to fully transition its CI/CD ecosystem to Harness, and a few more months for broader adoption across the organization.

With its cloud-first capabilities, Harness allows Trust Bank to efficiently deploy changes across its containerized applications on AWS, using services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for managing containerized workloads. While containerized applications account for one-third of its consumption, Trust Bank also utilizes key AWS services that are not containerized, such as Amazon Athena for querying and analyzing large datasets, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for simplifying database management, and Amazon Aurora for high-performance and scalable database solutions. This flexible integration powers a resilient, secure, and optimized infrastructure that can scale as Trust Bank continues to grow.

And it isn’t just the tech that scales: “Harness has subject experts in almost every domain of the supply chain, making them our ideal solution as we continue to push what’s possible in digital banking—for our customers and for our teams,” affirms Rajay Rai, chief technology information officer at Trust Bank.

“Harness has subject experts in almost every domain of the supply chain, making them our ideal solution as we continue to push what’s possible in digital banking—for our customers and for our teams." - Rajay Rai, Chief Technology Officer

Benefits

Trust Bank sought a solution that could seamlessly integrate with its AWS-native environment, reduce developer workloads, and keep the focus on innovation. “We really wanted to offload this entire onerous task of thinking about how to evolve the supply delivery chain lifecycle,” explained Rai at Trust Bank. By integrating Harness with its AWS infrastructure and automating compliance, security, and risk checks directly within the CI/CD pipeline, Trust Bank has yielded a hefty increase in the speed and reliability of its deployments. In fact, Trust Bank reduced its lead time for deployment from two weeks to just 24 hours. 

Additionally, automated compliance processes were achieved, allowing Trust Bank to implement all controls aligned with industry standards and maintain high standards of security. "By automating compliance and embedding security checks into our pipeline, we’ve been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to bring updates to production. We’re now able to focus more on delivering innovative products to our customers, without processes slowing us down," said Patil.

Capitalizing on faster deployments, achieving continuous compliance, and increased focus on innovation, Trust Bank can continue to rapidly scale and remain competitive in a crowded banking market. By leveraging automation through Harness and AWS, Trust Bank continues to meet stringent regulatory standards while delivering new products and features to customers at a much faster pace.