Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that provides access to foundation models from top AI providers, enabling organisations to build and scale generative AI applications. It is specifically designed to bring AI solutions to the financial sector. Let’s explore all that it can do…

Amazon Bedrock is a cloud platform that provides a comprehensive set of foundation models (FMs). These are used to create API services and tools for building, deploying, and managing solutions in the financial services industry. The platform helps customers to leverage the scalability, security, reliability, and innovation of the AWS cloud, while addressing the specific requirements and challenges of the financial sector. It offers solutions for banking, financial services, securities, capital markets, and insurance use cases, such as payments and risk management.

The financial industry is undergoing a rapid and profound transformation, driven by changing customer expectations, regulatory pressures, competitive forces, and technological innovations. Customers are demanding more personalised, convenient, and secure financial services, accessible anytime and anywhere. Regulators are imposing stricter rules and standards for data protection, privacy, and transparency. Competitors, including new entrants and fintech startups, are challenging the traditional business models and offerings of incumbent financial institutions. Innovations, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and Big Data, are creating new possibilities and challenges for delivering value and enhancing efficiency in the financial sector.

To succeed in this dynamic and complex environment, financial institutions need to adopt a cloud-first strategy that enables them to innovate faster, scale on demand, reduce costs, and comply with regulations. However, moving to the cloud is not a simple task, especially for the financial industry, which has unique and stringent requirements and challenges, such as:

• Security and compliance: Financial institutions need to protect their sensitive data and transactions from cyberattacks, fraud, and breaches, while meeting the regulatory and compliance standards of different jurisdictions and markets.
• Performance and reliability: These institutions need to ensure high availability, low latency, and consistent performance of their critical applications and services, especially during peak periods and market events.
• Integration and interoperability: They also need to integrate their legacy systems and applications with modern cloud services and technologies, while ensuring interoperability and compatibility across different platforms and vendors.
• Customisation and flexibility: Financial institutions need to customise their solutions and services to meet the specific needs and preferences of their customers, partners, and regulators, while maintaining flexibility and agility to adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands.
• Skills and resources: Such institutions need to acquire and retain the skills and resources to design, develop, and manage cloud solutions and services, while overcoming the cultural and organisational barriers to cloud adoption.

What is Amazon Bedrock?

Amazon Bedrock is built on the AWS cloud, with over 200 services and millions of active customers. AWS provides the global infrastructure, with 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, and plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions. AWS also offers a high level of security, compliance, and resilience, with over 200 security, compliance, and governance services and key features, and over 90 security standards and certifications.

Amazon Bedrock extends the AWS cloud with additional services and tools that are specifically designed and optimised for the financial industry. It provides the following benefits for financial industry customers.

• Accelerated innovation: Amazon Bedrock enables customers to quickly and easily build and launch new products and services, using pre-built templates, blueprints, and best practices for common financial industry use cases. It also allows them to access and integrate the latest technologies and innovations from AWS and its partners, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and quantum computing.
• Enhanced security and compliance: This platform helps customers to protect their data and transactions, using encryption, tokenisation, key management, and identity and access management services. It also helps them to comply with the regulatory and compliance standards of different jurisdictions and markets, using compliance checklists, audit reports, and automated controls.
• Improved performance and reliability: Amazon Bedrock ensures high availability, low latency, and consistent performance of customers’ applications and services, using auto-scaling, load balancing, and performance monitoring services. It also ensures business continuity and disaster recovery, using backup, restore, and replication services.
• Simplified integration and interoperability: The platform enables customers to easily integrate their legacy systems and applications with modern cloud services and technologies, using data migration, data transformation, and data integration services. It helps customers to ensure interoperability and compatibility across different platforms and vendors, using API management, service mesh, and event-driven architecture services.
• Increased customisation and flexibility: Amazon Bedrock allows customers to customise their solutions and services to meet the specific needs and preferences of their customers, partners, and regulators, using configuration, orchestration, and automation services. It also allows customers to maintain flexibility and agility to adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands, using serverless, container, and microservices services.
• Reduced costs and complexity: The platform helps customers to lower their total cost of ownership, using pay-as-you-go, consumption-based, and reserved pricing models. It also helps them to reduce the complexity and overhead of managing their cloud solutions and services, by using managed, fully managed, and serverless services.
• Enhanced skills and resources: Amazon Bedrock helps customers to acquire and retain the skills and resources to design, develop, and manage cloud solutions and services, using training, certification, and professional services. It helps them overcome the cultural and organisational barriers to cloud adoption, using change management, governance, and best practices services.

Design principles for financial services solutions

Amazon Bedrock is designed to be easy to use and accessible for customers of all sizes and at all stages of cloud adoption. It can be used in three ways.

• As a platform: Customers can use Amazon Bedrock as a platform to build, deploy, and manage their own financial industry solutions, using the services and tools provided by it.
• As a solution: This cloud platform can be used as a solution to access and deploy pre-built financial industry solutions, provided by Amazon Bedrock and its partners.
• As a service: Customers can use this platform as a service to outsource and delegate the design, development, and management of their financial industry solutions to Amazon Bedrock and its partners.

Common financial services solutions from Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock offers solutions for a wide range of use cases and domains in the financial industry.

• Banking: The platform enables customers to build and deploy solutions for core banking, payments, lending, deposits, cards, and digital banking. For example, customers can use it to launch a digital-only bank, using AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3, Amazon Cognito, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda.
• Financial services: With Amazon Bedrock, customers can build and deploy solutions for wealth management, asset management, personal finance, and robo-advisory. They can use it to create a personalised financial dashboard, using AWS services such as Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Personalise, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Lex.
• Securities: Amazon Bedrock helps customers to build and deploy solutions for trading, brokerage, clearing, settlement, and custody. It can be used to execute high-frequency trading strategies, using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon Kinesis, and AWS WAF.
• Capital markets: The platform enables customers to build and deploy solutions for market data, analytics, risk management, and regulatory reporting. For example, it can be used to ingest and process large volumes of market data, using AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift.
• Insurance: Amazon Bedrock enables the building and deployment of solutions for underwriting, claims, policy administration, and customer engagement. Customers can use Amazon Bedrock to automate and enhance their underwriting process, using AWS services such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and Amazon Fraud Detector.

Data management with Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that provides seamless access to foundation models from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon’s own Titan models. It enables organisations to build and scale generative AI applications efficiently, without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. A critical component of utilising Amazon Bedrock effectively is understanding its data management capabilities and practices.

Secure data ingestion and customisation

When working with Amazon Bedrock, organisations often need to customise foundation models using their proprietary data to better suit specific applications or domains. Data management begins with the secure ingestion of this data. Amazon Bedrock leverages AWS’s robust security framework to ensure that data is transmitted and stored securely.

• Encryption in transit and at rest: Data is encrypted using industry-standard protocols (TLS) during transmission and encrypted at rest using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
• Fine-grained access control: AWS identity and access management (IAM) policies allow organisations to control who has access to data and model customisation resources.

By securely ingesting data, organisations can fine-tune models confidently, knowing that their sensitive information is protected.

Data privacy and isolation

Data privacy is paramount when dealing with sensitive or proprietary information.

• Customer data isolation: Data used for customising models is isolated within the customer’s environment. It is not shared with other customers or used to train models outside the customer’s account.
• No data retention: Amazon Bedrock does not retain customer data beyond the customisation process unless explicitly instructed, ensuring that data is not stored longer than necessary.

This approach ensures that organisations retain full ownership and control over their data.

Data integration and management

Effective data management involves seamless integration with existing data workflows.

• Integration with AWS data services: Amazon Bedrock integrates with services like Amazon S3 for scalable storage, AWS Glue for data cataloguing and ETL processes, and Amazon SageMaker for additional machine learning tasks.
• Data versioning and lineage: Tracking different versions of data used for model customisation is essential. Using services like AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodePipeline helps manage data versions and maintain lineage.

These integrations facilitate a cohesive data pipeline, enhancing efficiency and traceability.

Scalability and performance optimisation

Handling large datasets requires scalable infrastructure.

• Elastic scaling: Amazon Bedrock automatically scales resources to handle fluctuations in data processing workloads.
• Optimised data processing: Utilising data preprocessing and transformation techniques improves model customisation efficiency.

Scalability ensures that performance remains consistent, even as data volumes grow.

Best practices for data management with Amazon Bedrock

• Data quality assurance: Ensure that data is accurate, complete, and relevant. High-quality data leads to better model performance.
• Security hygiene: Regularly review and update security policies, access controls, and encryption keys.
• Cost management: Monitor data storage and processing costs. Use AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to manage expenses proactively.
• Continuous improvement: Implement feedback loops to refine data management practices based on outcomes and evolving requirements.

Amazon Bedrock Agents

A critical feature introduced with Amazon Bedrock is the concept of Amazon Bedrock Agents, which empower developers to create sophisticated applications capable of performing multi-step tasks by orchestrating API calls and managing interactions with various services. In the banking sector, these agents can revolutionise processes by automating complex workflows, enhancing operational efficiency, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Amazon Bedrock Agents are designed to interpret user inputs, make contextual decisions, and perform actions by invoking APIs or other services. They leverage large language models (LLMs) to understand and generate human-like text, and are augmented with the ability to execute plans involving multiple steps. The agent architecture comprises:

• Natural language understanding (NLU): Utilises LLMs to parse and comprehend user requests.
• Planning mechanism: Generates a sequence of actions to fulfil the user’s intent.
• Execution engine: Orchestrates API calls and manages the workflow execution.
• Memory and state management: Maintains context over multiple interactions to ensure coherent dialogue and task execution.

Multi-step task automation in banking with Amazon Bedrock Agents

Banking operations often involve intricate processes requiring interaction with multiple systems, verification steps, and compliance checks. Amazon Bedrock Agents can automate these multi-step tasks by:

• Interfacing with core banking systems: Through secure API integrations, agents can access account information, transaction histories, and customer data.
• Performing data validation and verification: Agents can validate inputs against business rules, ensuring data integrity and compliance.
• Executing conditional logic: Based on intermediary results, agents can make decisions, trigger alerts, or escalate issues.
• Maintaining transactional integrity: Agents can support ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties by leveraging transactional APIs.

Here are some use cases.

• Loan application processing

Step 1: The agent collects applicant information via a conversational interface.

Step 2: It validates the information against eligibility criteria using internal APIs.

Step 3: Performs credit scoring by interfacing with third-party services.

Step 4: Generates a risk assessment report.

Step 5: If approved, initiates the loan issuance process; if not, provides feedback and alternatives to the applicant.

• Fraud detection and response

Step 1: Monitors transaction patterns in real-time.

Step 2: Identifies anomalies using machine learning models.

Step 3: Validates suspicious activities by cross-referencing with user behaviour data.

Step 4: Engages with the customer for verification via secure messaging.

Step 5: Takes action such as blocking transactions or accounts and escalates to compliance teams if necessary.

• Regulatory compliance reporting

Step 1: Aggregates data from various banking systems.

Step 2: Validates data against regulatory requirements.

Step 3: Compiles reports in required formats.

Step 4: Submits reports to regulatory bodies via secure channels.

Step 5: Archives reports and updates compliance logs.

Future trends

Amazon Bedrock is designed to support future trends and opportunities in the financial industry.

• Digital transformation: It enables customers to transform their business models, processes, and offerings, using digital technologies and channels.
• Open banking: Customers can participate and benefit from the open banking ecosystem, which allows them to access and share their financial data and services across different providers and platforms.
• Artificial intelligence: It helps customers to leverage the power and potential of artificial intelligence, which enables machines to perform tasks that require human intelligence, such as perception, understanding, learning, and decision making.
• Blockchain: Amazon Bedrock enables customers to explore and experiment with blockchain.
• Cloud-native development: It helps customers to adopt and embrace cloud-native development, which is a software development approach that leverages cloud capabilities and characteristics, such as scalability, elasticity, resilience, and automation.