Trust Bank Delivers Customer-First, Digital Banking with Confluent

Launched in September 2022, Trust Bank (aka Trust) is Singapore’s first digitally-native bank—and Standard Chartered Bank's second digital banking venture.

The key driver behind the launch? To bring real tangible value to customers through the accessibility and convenience of digital banking. Trust is cloud-native and integrated with the FairPrice Group ecosystem – one of Singapore’s most extensive consumer ecosystems – to deliver a world-class customer experience and cutting-edge security, built on a foundation of real-time data.

Confluent empowers Trust to use an event-driven, modular banking system that can expand into the future—and makes it easy for teams within Trust to consume and share data to build completely new experiences and an entire financial ecosystem for its customers.

Revolutionizing Banking: How Trust Bank Is Moving the Needle

Today, customers control how they choose to bank. What does this mean for banks? They have the choice to reinvent themselves or fall behind the competition. That’s why forward-thinking financial institutions are innovating from the outside in—an approach that believes customer value creation, customer insights, and customer experiences are the keys to success.

This is why Standard Chartered, in partnership with FairPrice Group, chose to launch a digital bank with a cloud-native approach to deliver world-class customer experience and cutting-edge security—all while integrated into one of Singapore’s most extensive consumer ecosystems.

Enter Trust Bank.

Trust came shortly after Standard Chartered launched its first digital bank, Mox Bank, in Hong Kong in 2020.

But what does it take to run a digital bank? According to Trust’s CIO Rajay Rai, it takes an evolutionary and simplified event-driven architecture powered by data streaming.

“To ensure banks are constantly pushing boundaries when it comes to delivering real-time customer experiences, it’s important to leverage a decoupled architecture, which allows them to plug in, modernize, and keep growing in a resilient manner,” Rai explained.

“We have a central nervous system that we tap into. We don’t need to change every part of our data architecture just to plug something in. You plug in whatever you want and build as you go—just like building blocks. And everything you build is compatible,” he said. “It provides an exciting way to scale out and extend the architecture— ensuring our small teams can run things smoothly.”

Confluent enables this architecture for Trust.

“It’s like the electricity grid: the energy that flows across the organization, ecosystem, and platform,” Rai said.

“The expectation these days is that banks should always be available. Customers constantly want real-time experiences. One of the best ways to facilitate that is by leveraging a platform like Confluent.” — Stuart Loxton, Data Platform Lead at Trust

Embracing Data to Enable Agility and Fast-Track Innovation

More importantly, Confluent enables Trust to foster agile, crossfunctional teams that build in a domain-driven way—facilitated by maximizing the discoverability and usability of data.

Data is the most important commodity for banks today, making it imperative for organizations to ensure that data is ubiquitous and available for any function of the bank to access in a safe and secure manner. This promotes data reusability, agility, greater collaboration, better efficiency, and trust within the organization.

Today, Confluent makes it easy for all teams within Trust (think marketing, fraud, cards, lending, etc.) to produce, share, consume, and trust their data assets—while ensuring appropriate quality controls and security policies are applied across the data estate.

“Confluent delivers a modern approach to break down data silos and enables Trust with fully governed real-time data flows that can be shaped into multiple contexts while in motion. “Confluent delivers a modern approach to break down data silos and enables Trust with fully governed real-time data flows that can be shaped into multiple contexts while in motion." — Stuart Loxton, Data Platform Lead at Trust

Built-in governance in Confluent’s platform also helps Trust meet all financial regulations and gain customer trust.

Along with built-in governance comes loose coupling.

Confluent facilitates an event-driven architecture where teams have explicit ownership around their own data, and downstream services can use and harness that data to add and build what they need.

“When we want our marketing team to build customizable notifications, they can subscribe to existing customer data generated by other teams available in Confluent. Moreover, with Schema Registry, we are able to eliminate inter-service bottlenecks, so developers can seamlessly connect to any data system while maintaining schema compatibility, version control, and quality assurance,” Loxton said.

Powering a Cloud-Native Banking Infrastructure with Confluent

Trust has a small team of talented engineers and data experts. And at the heart of Trust’s architecture is a modular and configurable system powered by cloud-native banking technology company Thought Machine.

The system consists of a real-time ledger, which gives banks complete control over the management of data and the ability to modify and launch products while replicating the bank’s code base of existing back book of products including savings accounts, loans, and mortgages. And all data is transmitted in and out of the ledger in real time.

The banking platform architecture leverages Thought Machine’s technology with Apache Kafka® as the streaming backbone. “The key objective was to harness the power of Kafka for more than just producing and consuming data,” Loxton said.

However, there’s a lot of complexity involved in not only getting it to run, but creating a stable system.

The goal for the banking platform was to have pure cloud-native architecture which could enable Trust to run and scale with high resilience. Choosing to run the platform on Kubernetes ensures the bank can automate the management of the platform, and reduce its cost of ownership and maintenance.

Since Trust is founded on Kubernetes, going with Confluent for Kubernetes was an easy choice as it allows Trust to achieve the same simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency of the cloud without the headaches of managing complex, Kafka-related infrastructure operations. Trust gets all the components of a complete cloud platform out of the box, with enterprise-grade configurations, enabling them to deploy clusters in minutes.

Confluent has helped Trust:

• Reduce the operational complexity and risks that come with running a complex, distributed system like Kafka

• Strategically evolve their platform to be more manageable, scalable, and resilient—and one that meets the expectations of regulators and customers

• Reduce dependencies on key people, such as Kafka experts, so they could maintain smaller teams

• Reduce the cost of ownership and risk of downtime

In addition to the Operator, Loxton said they wanted to tap into Confluent tools and features like connectors, Schema Registry, selfbalancing clusters, and rack awareness, to enable the simplicity of upgrades and auto scaling of clusters.

Key Results Trust Bank Achieved with Confluent

Built a scalable and resilient platform: Choosing Confluent helped Trust Bank build a resilient platform and run efficiently. Be it upgrades, increasing storage, or performing any change, Confluent made it easy.

Built-in governance: Embedding governance into our platform through technology helps clients meet regulatory requirements, gain customer trust, and enables flexibility around autonomy of teams. In Trust Bank’s case, Confluent Schema Registry helps ensure governance is built-in in around schema management and evolution, helping teams understand and work within the confines of data contracts.

Reduced total cost of ownership: Fintech firms are required to innovate, while constantly dealing with constraints around how they modernize their architecture. Confluent helps with this. Trust Bank’s use of event-driven architecture supported by Confluent helps it to increase efficiency and reduce costs, whilst innovating around realtime customer experience.

Learn More About Trust Bank