Amazon Aurora for Core Banking Systems

A Core Banking system is, as the name suggests, the very core of a bank. It is the back-end system that processes banking transactions, posts updates to accounts and other financial records and often holds critical customer information. It typically includes deposit, loan and credit processing capabilities, with interfaces to general ledger and reporting systems. Because banks have the responsibility of safeguarding their customers’ assets, core banking systems must be engineered with utmost accuracy, reliability and data integrity.

In the past, these goals have been achieved with combinations of complex infrastructure and software, which leads to a high cost of ownership for banks to serve their customers. More recently, banks and other financial institutions are looking to reduce these costs wherever possible without compromising on availability, resilience and performance. One of the key contributors to the cost of core banking systems has been the commercial database engines that many of them depended on; Open Source alternatives not considered to have the required capabilities to replace them.

However, in the 10 years since Amazon Aurora was released, we’ve seen a fundamental shift with AWS customers in Financial Services, with customers publicly sharing their experiences running critical systems on Amazon Aurora. This includes some of the most heavily regulated entities like FINRA, Dow Jones, Capital One, Standard Chartered Bank, Fannie Mae and Goldman Sachs. Amazon Aurora is also the database engine of choice for many core banking software vendors, including 10x Banking and Thought Machine.

Financial services customers using Amazon Aurora are finding the most benefit from the combination of the PostgreSQL community alongside Amazon’s own Aurora enhancements. PostgreSQL is a feature-rich open source relational database backed by more than 20 years of community development, first starting in 1985. This has led to a very mature and structured development model for the core database engine, with predictable release cycles, an essential feature for enterprise customers. Additionally, AWS’s contributions help align Aurora’s development with the broader PostgreSQL community’s best practices and standards, ensuring compatibility and stability.

In this blog, we will dive into key reasons why these large financial services customers and vendors choose Amazon Aurora for their most critical workload:

1. Resiliency and Availability
2. Performance and Scalability
3. Operational Benefits

By the end of this article, you’ll understand how regulated customers in the financial services industry are benefiting from Amazon Aurora’s combination of the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source.

1. Resiliency & Availability

Distributed storage optimizes resiliency

Any unplanned service…