Data is at the heart of cloud-native bank

Trust Bank (Trust) is one of the world’s fastest growing digital banks, reaching 12% share of the Singapore market within its first year. As a cloud-native digital bank, Trust knew fast, well-informed decision-making would be critical to the bank's success. At its inception, Trust wanted to implement a solution that delivered business-wide observability, data insights and security analytics.

Rajay Rai, CIO at Trust, has extensive technology experience in the financial services sector, giving him a unique perspective when setting up the bank’s digital platform from scratch.

“With how fast Trust Bank moves in terms of growth and changes, we needed a platform that could complement our speed and pace, align with cloud-native technologies and facilitate all our monitoring. Sumo Logic is that solution,” said Rajay Rai, CIO at Trust Bank.

Sumo Logic’s cloud-native architecture, turn-key API integrations and pre-built rules accelerated Trust’s data capabilities. It also simplified the integration of Sumo Logic with Trust Bank’s AWS environment. The platform readily scaled to ingest and analyze the bank’s data telemetry volumes of 1 TB per day.

Sumo Logic delivers on Trust’s goal of combining log analytics, comprehensive observability and security analytics into one solution that provides advanced insights via a single pane of glass.

“We have a unified approach with Sumo Logic that gives us central visibility into our observability, business intelligence and security monitoring needs. This means that we all work from the same data without multiple tools,” said Rai, adding that “These metrics drive daily decisions across our business.”

“Sumo Logic gives us the means to connect our technology, people and processes so everything is seamless and frictionless. Transparency is a key part of our culture and the data that we can access across the firm supports this.” said Rai.

The Sumo Logic platform applies advanced analytics to distill more than two million data points per minute that keep the Bank informed on business metrics. In terms of making sense of all that data, Rai cites three factors:

• Search queries
  “Sumo Logic’s extensive query options make writing queries easy. That's a testament to how user-friendly the product is because learning the query language is an easy ramp-up.”

• Dashboards
  “The dashboards express the data in a way that our team can infer the right information from it, so we can make the right decisions to align with the expectations of our business and customers.”

• Speed
  “Our bank operates in real-time at the speed of ‘now’. Sumo Logic’s real-time telemetry is essential in our ability to make decisions every second and react instantly.”

Optimizing platform performance and customer journey

As a digitally-native business, Trust Bank wanted to build an onboarding experience that was fast and seamless for customers. The site reliability engineers (SRE) use Sumo Logic’s built-in analytics and metrics on the customer journey to rapidly identify any bottlenecks or friction points. Informed by this real-time data, the team can identify and resolve an issue as soon as it appears.

As a result, the SRE team has a seamless, end-to-end process that shortens the time it takes to find and fix an issue. This enables a fully-digital onboarding journey that – at around 3 minutes – is one of the fastest of a digital bank anywhere in the world.

In addition to consistently monitoring the banking platform’s performance, the SRE team also uses Sumo Logic to assess the quality of changes to the banking platform before they go into production. “Looking at how services are performing in our non-production environment helps us assess any potential issues and gives us predictive power. This helps us optimise the performance of our platform,” said Rohan Kulkarni, SRE at Trust Bank.

Gaining real-time business intelligence

The Sumo Logic platform is so simple to use that technical and non-technical employees are active users. Product owners, business analysts and others can use Sumo Logic for real-time business intelligence to drive daily decision making and strategic planning.

Indeed, the product managers are some of the bank’s most active users, leveraging Sumo Logic’s data analytics for feedback on how the business functions minute by minute.

“The product team uses Sumo Logic’s dashboards and simple query searches to draw insights that inform overall business intelligence.” said Rai. “Using real-time data to make smarter decisions is deeply rooted in our way of working as a business.”

Another key driver of Trust’s success is its agile and collaborative culture. The collaboration fostered when teams across the business use data in Sumo Logic to strategize and problem solve encourages this. “The ability to share a link to a Sumo Logic query that shows a chart or data makes collaboration between different teams easy as everyone speaks the same language,” said Rai.