TBC Launches Space Neobank in 8 Months Using AWS

TBC Bank gets its digital, cloud-only bank to market in 8 months using AWS. Established in 2018, Space Neobank provides retail banking services to more than 200,000 customers across Georgia. It uses Amazon Rekognition as well as services such as Corezoid Process Engine from the Amazon Marketplace to accelerate provisioning and innovation.

Georgia’s TBC Bank—one of the two biggest banks in the country—wanted to complement its existing services by creating a digital, cloud-only challenger bank, which it called Space Neobank. Lasha Gurgenidze, who was TBC’s head of innovations at the time, played a key role in launching the bank using Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Entering a new market with legacy, on-premises infrastructure was at odds with the agility we wanted to achieve. We knew we could start operations in the cloud in a matter of months,” he says.

“From concept to first customer onboarding took just 8 months,” says Gurgenidze, who is now general manager of Space Neobank. “In 1 month, we attracted around 40,000 customers. We proved that you can run a branchless, fully digital bank entirely on the cloud.” Space Neobank’s services—including loans, savings products, and debit cards—are fully digital. For example, the onboarding process, which the bank follows to confirm new clients’ identification, uses the Amazon Rekognition image analysis service to compare customers’ selfies with identification documents, such as their passports.

Today, Space Neobank has more than 200,000 customers in Georgia. According to Gurgenidze and senior software developer George Khvedeliani, the reason behind this success has a lot to do with the simplicity of using AWS. “Gaining regulatory approval on AWS was easy—every document or certificate you need for approval is in the public domain. This isn’t always the case with other cloud providers,” says Gurgenidze.

Khvedeliani adds, “We can get everything we need in the AWS Cloud, including off-the-shelf services like Corezoid Process Engine from the AWS Marketplace. Every second that we can free up for DevOps goes directly to finding new ways to deliver a fantastic customer experience.”

“In the past, completing a banking transaction out of working hours was more like science fiction than reality. Now, customers can access services instantly,” says Gurgenidze. This is only possible due to the speed with which the challenger bank can provision and innovate in the cloud.

“Getting all the components to build an on-premises infrastructure could easily take us more than 6 months,” says Gurgenidze. “It would take us 6 minutes to set up using AWS. This will make it easy for us to expand into new markets, as we’re planning to do in Germany later this year. We can simply replicate the AWS stack we’ve created in Georgia in a few clicks.”