Industry · Financial Services

Cloud and data for banks, insurers, and the regulators that watch them.

For banks and insurers whose highest-value customers live in London or Mumbai but whose regulators sit in Nairobi or Dubai. We build the AWS foundations that reach both — EKYC, Video Banking, Prompt BI, SAP on AWS.

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The challenge

What’s hard.

Financial services in Africa and the Gulf operates under more concurrent constraints than any other industry: regulatory oversight that varies by jurisdiction; data-residency rules that increasingly mandate in-country storage; transaction-load shapes that peak around payday windows and the end of the salary month; uptime SLAs measured in minutes per year; and a customer base that expects mobile-first onboarding without compromising AML/KYC discipline.

A cloud architecture that ignores any one of these turns into a board-level incident. A cloud architecture that handles all of them is a competitive moat.

And — increasingly — your highest-deposit customers, your longest-tenure relationships, and your biggest mortgage tickets are in London, Toronto, Mumbai, or Doha. Diaspora customers are among the highest-value and hardest-to-serve in the bank, and a cloud architecture that does not reach them forces those customers to either fly home or take their business to a bank that does.

We build the second kind.

Where we focus

Diaspora banking, end-to-end.

The customer is in London. The bank is in Nairobi. The regulator is in both.

Diaspora banking is where the African and Gulf bank competes for its highest-value customers — and where the operational reality is the hardest. The customer might be in Atlanta, Sydney, Johannesburg, or Riyadh. The bank is in Nairobi or Dubai. The regulator is in both. The customer needs an account, a loan, a KYC refresh, or a joint session with a wealth officer — and the alternative to a digital solution is often a flight home that costs more than the bank fee.

Most banks address parts of this. We build it as one flow on AWS:

1. Onboard them — EKYC

Document OCR, face match, sanctions and PEP screening, and AML risk scoring against the customer’s resident-country ID — without forcing them into a branch they cannot reach.

2. Serve them — Video Banking

Secure customer-banker video sessions on AWS Chime SDK and Amazon Connect. KYC refresh, loan signing, wealth-management consultations, and joint account opening — recorded, encrypted, archived to S3 Object Lock.

3. Know them — Prompt BI

The wealth and retail teams ask Prompt BI in plain English: “Which Toronto-based customers are due for KYC refresh?” or “What is the 30-day-past-due rate by country of residence?” Answered against the warehouse, scoped to the team’s permissions.

The diaspora customer accesses account opening, KYC refresh, loan signing, and wealth-management sessions from their resident country. The bank keeps the regulator-grade evidence trail. The relationship survives the geography.

What we build

Capabilities we deliver.

Prompt BI is our flagship GenAI offering — alongside the AWS, Snowflake, and Informatica services we build for this industry.

Prompt BI FLAGSHIP

Our flagship GenAI offering — vendor-agnostic. Natural-language business intelligence delivered on Snowflake (Cortex Analyst) and the AWS-native stack (Amazon QuickSight + Amazon Q in QuickSight). Same governed experience, your choice of warehouse — with lineage, row-level access, and accuracy guard-rails built in from day one.

EKYC

EKYC is two problems, not one: the regulatory onboarding (KYC / AML / CFT) and the user-experience flow that doesn’t drive customers out before they finish. Most deployments solve one and break the other. We build both as one system on AWS — identity verification, document OCR, sanctions screening, AML risk scoring, integrated to your core platform via API — for branch walk-ins, fintech-app installs, and the diaspora customer who will never set foot in the country. The audit trail a regulator expects; the onboarding flow your product owner is willing to sign off on.

Video Banking

Diaspora banking, done end-to-end. For a Kenyan or UAE bank, the diaspora customer is the highest-value, hardest-to-serve segment: the customer is in London, Toronto, Mumbai, or Doha — and the bank cannot onboard them, refresh their KYC, or sign loan documents without them flying back. Video Banking closes that gap. Secure customer-banker video sessions on AWS — identity verification at session start, document signing, and regulator-compliant archival — built on the AWS Chime SDK and Amazon Connect, with end-to-end encryption and tamper-evident archival to S3 Object Lock. The diaspora customer accesses account opening, KYC refresh, and loan signing from their resident country; the bank keeps the regulator-grade evidence trail.

EDMS

Most EDMS deployments accumulate documents faster than they retire them, and the audit trail erodes the moment retention becomes a debate rather than a rule. We build EDMS on AWS-native storage — S3 for hot, S3 Glacier for the cold tier, Object Lock for retention as a policy not a promise. Loan files, claims, policy documents, KYC artefacts — versioning, lineage, and access controls designed for a regulator visit, not patched in afterwards.

SAP on AWS & Core Banking

Migrate and modernise SAP-based core systems on AWS with multi-AZ HA, HANA System Replication, and the cutover discipline that production financial systems require. See our SAP-on-AWS playbook.

AWS Well-Architected Review

A structured audit of your AWS estate against the five Well-Architected pillars. Surfaces concrete cost, security, and resilience improvements. Learn more.

How we prove it

Customers, stories, and reference architecture.

Leading East African banks & insurers

Shinrai works with financial-services customers across the region. We publish named case studies as customers consent to attribution.

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SAP on AWS playbook

The migration playbook we use for African and Gulf enterprises modernising SAP-based core systems on AWS — sizing, certified instances, HA/DR, cutover.

Read the playbook →

AWS + Snowflake + Informatica Trifecta

How we build governed data platforms that earn the business’s trust — the architecture financial-services analytics teams need.

Read the article →

Compliance & standards

Frameworks we build against.

Banks, insurers, property groups, and SaaS firms in our markets answer to multiple regulators. We build AWS environments that support compliance against the frameworks below — without claiming certifications Shinrai itself does not hold.

Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). Prudential Guidelines and Risk Management Guidelines for banks — data-residency expectations, IT risk, and outsourcing controls for licensed institutions.

Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE). Supervisory framework, IT-risk and outsourcing rules including the cloud-service-provider posture banks and insurers operate under.

PCI DSS. Required wherever card data is in scope — the controls extend to AWS account boundaries, encryption posture, key management, and audit-trail integrity. We build environments structured to support PCI-eligible workloads.

Kenya Data Protection Act 2019 & UAE PDPL. Personal-data handling, cross-border transfer rules, breach-notification windows, and consent management. The Kenya DPA Office and the UAE Data Office are the enforcement contacts.

Shinrai builds AWS environments that support your compliance posture for the frameworks above. Certification ownership stays with the regulated entity.

Shinrai Technologies
Shinrai Technologies — Cloud & Data Partner.

Modernising your bank or insurer on AWS?

Schedule a working session with our financial-services architects. Sizing, certified-instance choice, HA/DR pattern, regulatory posture — covered in 30 minutes.

AWS Advanced Tier Partner

Snowflake & Informatica Partners

Teams in Nairobi & Dubai

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