Pioneering open banking innovation using AWS with Al Salam Bank

Al Salam Bank, one of Bahrain’s largest Islamic financial institutions and fastest-growing banks, sought to move beyond the traditional banking framework to improve financial inclusion and create a more accessible, intuitive, and value-driven financial experience. Although open banking presented an opportunity to reach broader client segments, adoption in Bahrain remained relatively nascent, with many use cases still centered on basic account aggregation and budgeting tools.

The bank envisioned ONE App as an open banking digital marketplace powered by Al Salam Bank, offering selected banking, financial, and nonbanking services through one digital platform. These include financing, “buy now, pay later,” savings, investments, and partner-supported services, while maintaining strong regulatory, security, and Sharia governance standards.

ONE App introduced a new digital proposition to the market, requiring a technology foundation that could support rapid launch, controlled experimentation, scalable growth, and resilient operations without significant up-front infrastructure investment. The application also needed to support sensitive financial workloads requiring 99.99 percent uptime, compliance with strong industry security standards, and data residency requirements.

These priorities led Al Salam Bank to select AWS as the foundation for ONE App, providing the flexibility to build, test, scale, and enhance services with agility while meeting operational and regulatory expectations. “We chose AWS because of its maturity, the range of services available, and its proven track record in financial services,” says Ahmed Buqais, deputy chief technology officer at Al Salam Bank.

Al Salam Bank built ONE App using a scalable, multiregion architecture on AWS designed to support frequent service launches while maintaining security, availability, resiliency, and regulatory alignment. The bank worked with AWS Enterprise Support to accelerate innovation, strengthen security, and streamline cloud operations. The application combines microservices and serverless architecture so that individual services can scale independently as adoption grows. “Using AWS local team expertise and AWS Enterprise Support, we received architectural guidance and bolstered operational resilience, helping us launch ONE App as a highly resilient system at an optimized cost,” says Hussain Al-Saibai, head of IT architecture at Al Salam Bank.

The solution uses AWS Lambda to run code without thinking about servers or clusters, supporting serverless, event-driven workloads that automate business logic and scale with usage. For transactional data, the bank uses Amazon Aurora to support high performance and availability at global scale. The bank also uses Amazon CloudFront to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds, providing consistent user experience as demand increases.

For services requiring greater control, ONE App also uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to build, manage, and run containerized applications at any scale. This gives Al Salam Bank greater flexibility in managing specific workloads while maintaining a modular architecture. “By using containers and serverless services on AWS, we could grow services independently without changing the core architecture,” says Al-Saibai.

To support rapid iteration, Al Salam Bank uses infrastructure as code and automated deployment pipelines to manage application updates. This helps the bank introduce new services efficiently while maintaining consistency across environments. The same foundation supports early AI-driven workflows for client service and document processing, including use cases developed on Amazon Bedrock, which supports the development of generative AI applications and agents at production scale.

Identity, security, and access management are central to the open banking experience. Al Salam Bank uses Amazon Cognito to implement secure, scalable authentication and access control for users and microservices in minutes, while it uses Amazon API Gateway to create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale to coordinate interactions between application components and support the secure delivery of open banking services.

By running ONE App entirely on AWS cloud infrastructure, Al Salam Bank established a secure, scalable, and resilient foundation while keeping costs aligned to actual usage. The bank moved from concept to launch in less than 12 months and continues to release new services every 1–2 months, steadily expanding the application’s capabilities and client value proposition.

Within the first year, ONE App surpassed 60,000 downloads and supported more than 17 financial and nonfinancial services. The platform has processed increasing volumes of financing applications without downtime or scalability issues, including periods of heightened demand. Automation and AI-driven workflows have also improved operational efficiency, helping a small operations team manage high application volumes while maintaining service reliability.

Beyond operational performance metrics, ONE App has helped broaden access to financial products by making selected services more accessible to wider retail client segments. “With ONE App on AWS, we reach higher client volumes by making products available at a small entry point,” says Haitham Al-Haddad, general manager of ONE App and head of digital channels at Al Salam Bank. “Services formerly limited to affluent clients are now economically feasible for retail clients.”

Looking ahead, Al Salam Bank plans to expand open banking use cases within ONE App, scale transaction volumes, and prepare for regional growth. “Working alongside AWS feels more like a long-term relationship than a vendor interaction,” says Ahmed Buqais, deputy chief technology officer at Al Salam Bank. “As we expand and add services, we expect to continue building on what we already have.”