With the banking industry transforming at a lightning pace, FAB elected to refactor its monolithic applications and adopt a microservices-based architecture. This was done to accelerate development, improve business agility and enhance the banks overall customer experience.

FAB implemented Kong Gateway Enterprise to advance the bank's company-wide legacy to cloud-native transformation initiatives and deliver reliable financial services.

When Jayakumar Ganesan, Head of Service - Digital Platforms at FAB, and his team evaluated API gateways, they saw Kong's modular plug-and-play design as a major advantage. It empowered FAB's developers to focus on building business logic, architects to accelerate time to value and operators to focus on connectivity management.

"For most API gateways on the market, you typically need to undergo some level of customization effort to have it properly fit into your existing ecosystem. Industry-standard plugins that work out of the box are one of Kong's major strengths. Getting out of the business of writing custom plugins allows us to focus on building new functionality rather than utilizing more resources to maintain the API gateway infrastructure," said Jayakumar. "In terms of manageability, scalability, and agility, what Kong provides us is best in class."

FAB is leveraging Kong to efficiently provision and manage high-performance runtimes across its AWS, Azure, and on-premise environments. The United Arab Emirates bank is now charting a course to expedite time to market for its customer-facing applications by scaling its containerized ecosystem.

"We are aggressively moving our APIs into a containerized ecosystem. We currently have about 200 APIs in production that are running our core business our goal is to double that number over the next three to five years, and these will all be powered by Kong," said Jayakumar. "All of our legacy services and any new APIs we develop will run through the Kong platform by default."

"As we moved toward microservices, we required a lightweight solution that could seamlessly align with our multi-cloud and on-premises environments," said Jayakumar.

Kong's deployment agnosticism, plugin architecture, and ingress controller designed to enhance service orchestration within containerized architectures make this possible. As a result, FAB has been able to cut operational costs by 57% and dramatically reduce the need for developers to write infrastructure code.

"With Kong, we delivered one of our commercial mobile banking applications in three months instead of seven. We also now save four months of total custom development time by utilizing Kong's turnkey features and plugins."