Smart goes all-in on AWS

Smart has today announced a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new agreement will accelerate Smart’s global expansion to new markets, as well as the development of its retirement technology platform, Keystone, which provides real-time fund management and embedded integration plus automation capabilities, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). 

Smart has used AWS’ market-leading cloud infrastructure since 2021 to seamlessly scale support for millions of members across Europe, the US, and the Middle East; this increased the support of assets under management by 100% in just 18 months. By using AWS Cloud, Smart is able to deploy Keystone infrastructure in new markets at pace, and strengthen disaster recovery procedures, providing a further layer of resilience and efficiency for Smart’s global customer base. In expanding its use of AWS, Smart will be able to launch Keystone across financial services enterprises in the Middle East, followed by any AWS Region globally in a matter of hours.

As part of the new agreement, Smart will also expand its use of AWS’s data analytics, ML, and cloud services to support innovative product rollouts that enhance the experience for employers, employees, and customers through the Keystone platform. Smart will use Amazon Redshift for large-scale data warehousing and analytics, Amazon SageMaker for building and deploying ML models, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) for real-time data processing. This will enable Smart to provide customers with actionable insights into their pension performance, helping savers plan for their retirement, and build investment strategies, all of which aims to improve their financial wellbeing. 

Smart will also experiment with AWS’s generative AI services, including Amazon Q for Business. This is fully managed service that enables employees to use natural language to request information or assistance, speeding up their ability to troubleshoot customer queries and improve the efficiency in dealing with incident management challenges. 

Bahea Izmeqna, Chief Product Officer at Smart said:

“We have bold ambitions for growth and we are thrilled to collaborate with AWS to realise those goals. As pension systems across the world evolve, innovative new technology will lead the way. The ability to support governments and large financial services organisations was key to our requirements, with Keystone is at the forefront of change among these sectors. Our ability to leverage the scalability, security and reliability of AWS has been critical in our mission to transform retirement, saving and financial wellbeing for generations around the world.”

‍Tricia Troth, Head of UK & Ireland Startups, Amazon Web Services said:‍

‍“We are delighted that Smart has chosen to innovate and scale the Keystone platform using AWS’ extensive and highly secure global cloud infrastructure. By deepening its use of AWS’s advanced data analytics, ML, Generative AI, and AI services, Smart will be able to develop new products and features, expand into new markets and customer sets, that help more people around the world to grow and manage their savings.”