AWS partner Mechanical Rock builds Bankwest a cloud dev platform

West Australian banking staple Bankwest has advanced its cloud adoption with a new Amazon Web Services hosted development platform and new APIs deployed by software delivery automation specialists Mechanical Rock.

Designed to speed up the development process for small autonomous teams advancing Bankwest technologies, the platform allows developers a space to experiment and create new tools while having visibility and control over the platform, according to Mechanical Rock chief executive Hamish Tedeschi.

“In order to defend its market-leading position against digital disruptors, Bankwest has invested heavily in technology-led innovation. Part of this is creating an environment where small, autonomous teams of developers can deliver value quickly,” he said.

“To enable this vision, development teams need both functional autonomy and technical autonomy – the ability to deploy the tools and process they need to deliver quickly.

However, Bankwest exists in a rigid regulatory environment and it must protect its brand while empowering its developers.

Some of the features of the platform includes: a self-service catalogue from which developers can provision application environment templates with baked-in security controls; a development sandbox that allows for experimentation with minimal overhead and bureaucracy; and automated controls to prevent cost bursting and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

The six-month deployment also saw Mechanical Rock onboard to the platform a valuations API to speed up the lending process around home loans. The project integrates technologies from the Bankwest back office and CoreLogic, a company that provides property data, information and analytics.

The API set’s key features include allowing a lender to request a valuation before an application is commenced, provision of information about property value and its suitability as collateral for a loan, and internally visible management of valuations conducted.

Tedeschi said the automation improvement, infrastructure-as-code deployment, dashboard visibility of environment configurations and code compliance provided a modern framework that would see Bankwest deepen its investment in cloud.