First Abu Dhabi Bank Accelerates Cloud Connectivity With Kong
The UAE's largest bank relies on Kong to cut operational costs and enable open banking
Reduction in operational costs
Reduced application delivery from 7 months to 3 months
Expanded from 200 to 500 API endpoints
Strengthening the Threads of Customer-First Innovation
Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates with an international network spanning five continents.
In line with its commitment to putting customers first, FAB is always looking to invest strategically in market-leading solutions that will strengthen the financial well-being of its customers and stakeholders. FAB seeks to ensure that cutting-edge technology, agility, and innovation are designed into their processes and infrastructure for their products and services.
Stitching Together Legacy and Cloud Native Use Cases
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.
FAB Covets Kong’s Plug-and-Play API Gateway
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."
Provisioning for a Highly Performant Containerized Ecosystem
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."
Recapturing Development Efficiency With Kong
"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."
"The scalability and agility that Kong provides our bank is best in class compared to any other service connectivity platforms that we have worked with."
More Customer Stories
"Kong provides that single point of entry... [so] it’s easier for Aviva to manage all the traffic that comes through safely and securely."
“Kong’s ability to be used in many different use cases, across multiple infrastructures, with a built-in lightweight design, allows us to achieve this while keeping costs as lean as possible.”
“Partnering with Kong has greatly accelerated our API business and strategy.”
"Kong provides flexible deployment and has a great user experience interface."
"Kong's end-to-end API management platform provides us with the ability to digitally transform our business."
"With Kong, we've taken a big leap forward in our ability to reduce operational overhead while efficiently scaling to support the increase in traffic requests from our rapidly growing customer base."
"Kong has allowed our healthcare platform to remain highly secure as we rapidly scale"