Country’s first digital bank is on cloud nine
SOUTH Africa’s first digital bank, TymeBank uses AWS (Amazon Web Services) as their cloud provider because of its maturity and resilience.
“It was important for us to have a cloud provider that we could trust and AWS has a solid track record,” said the bank’s chief information officer, Dieter Botha.
He was speaking at the annual AWS Summit in Cape Town where businesses of all sizes get together to discuss how cloud is accelerating innovation.
“We’re the first digital bank in the country to receive a banking licence over the past 19 years. At our core we are about financial inclusion. There are too many people under-served by the current banking system,” said Botha.
He said having access – physical, financial and emotional – was a big deal for people.
“For you and I, we hop in our cars and head to the nearest branch, go to a teller and get a ticket. If you’re opening an account, you’ll be lucky to get a debit card given to you. It typically gets couriered or you could come and collect it. For someone in the rural areas, they’d have to catch two or three taxis just to get to that scenario, so it’s often inconvenient or impossible for them.”
Botha added that expensive bank charges added to the barrier and being bombarded by an array of products got tricky for many people.
“We knew we had to simplify this, but like many other digital banks in the world, we have a different problem. A lot of other digital banks are all about an app only, in South Africa and emerging markets, the physical world is important. We’re still a cash- heavy society, and we had to solve that, and we believe we’ve cracked the code.”
TymeBank partnered with Pick n Pay and Boxer stores, giving them access to more than 800 stores in the country.
“And simply with just your biometric – no paperwork – at the kiosk, you’ll have a bank account, savings account and a personalised debit card with your name printed all in under five minutes.”
This is made possible by the AWS cloud.
“As a digital bank, we weren’t born in the cloud and we decided last year to lift and shift to the cloud and move our data centres in six months into 450 Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances. Today, we have over 85% of our entire bank running in the AWS cloud.”
Last month, TymeBank exceeded 500 000 customers after launching publicly just five months ago. |
Too many people are under-served by the current banking system. Dieter Botha TYMEBANK’S CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER