success story

Virtusa's Powerful Open Banking Sandbox Accelerates Digital Innovation for a Leading UAE Bank

Emirates NBD is a leading banking group in the Middle East. The bank has always had a deep-rooted culture of innovation by challenging existing practices to identify improvements. This has led to several successful launches in recent years, all attributed to its forward-thinking ethos. The development of next-generation digital and mobile banking services with the aim to increase smart service adoption in the UAE is one example of how Emirates NBD is leading its innovation.

 

 

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The Challenge

To remain a leader in innovation and continue to bring new and differentiated experiences to its corporate customers, Emirates NBD needed a development platform.

Emirates NBD needed a development platform for ideation and quick experimentation with selected FinTechs focused on corporate banking. The bank also intended to comply with Open Banking regulations, and therefore, required a PSD2-compliant sandbox and relevant APIs. However, long onboarding time and due diligence processes made it challenging to work productively with FinTechs and meet regulatory expectations.

The Solution

Emirates NBD partnered with Virtusa to develop an AWS cloud-based, gamified Open Banking sandbox that enables developers and FinTechs to ideate, build and publish API applications, and create minimum viable products (MVPs).

Emirates NBD's Open Banking sandbox is a self-contained environment hosted on AWS, providing FinTech's and developers a simulated banking space to experiment and create real-world apps and services. The platform consists of over 200 APIs and 900 endpoints covering retail, corporate, and small or mid-size business lines. Developers also have access to over five million simulated transactions data related to one million customer accounts, based on the BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) model. This data has been restructured to replicate Emirates NBD's retail and corporate banking data and is fully compliant with Open Banking regulations and ISO20022 standards for electronic data interchange between financial institutions.

AWS Services Used:

  • Amazon EC2
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • Amazon Aurora MySQL
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
  • Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
  • AWS Key Management System
  • AWS S3
The Solution
The Benefits

Reduced onboarding time of FinTechs by 75%, translating to rapid innovation.

Virtusa's Open Banking sandbox brings the newest and most competitive experiences to market first. Emirates NBD is now able to rapidly experiment and test MVPs to lead a new and diverse set of digital-native services, adding significant value to the innovative ecosystem. The bank can now conduct experiments with a predefined list of FinTechs and has reduced the onboarding time of FinTechs by 75%, translating to rapid innovation: creative ideas are turned into real working prototypes faster, tested earlier, and brought to market rapidly at a reduced development cost. The platform also gives developers access to a wealth of transaction data to test meaningful value propositions in the banking space. The sandbox makes Emirates NBD more accessible to developers with API technology, which boosts the bank's role in accelerating the region's innovation ecosystem and creates increased value for its customers and partners. This revolutionary virtual plug and play platform for collaboration, co-creation, and innovation made Emirates NBD the first in its region to offer such a robust platform that accelerates innovation and increases time to market.

For more information visit www.emiratesnbdlab.com

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