First Bank, AWS unite to champion customer-first innovation

First Bank is deepening its push for digital transformation through a strategic alignment with Amazon Web Services (AWS), placing customer-centric innovation at the heart of its agenda.

As part of its First Tech Connect Series, the bank recently hosted a fireside chat with Werner Vogels, Global Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, with an intent to harness cloud and AI to elevate service delivery, agility, and trust.

He explored strategies for scaling securely, embedding innovation, and maintaining a deep focus on customer needs in enterprise technology.

“Most of the bets that you make don’t work out,” Vogels said, setting the tone for a conversation centred on experimentation and resilience. “So what’s important is that failure doesn’t become an obstacle to progress. If failing is a badge of honour, as long as you learn from it, that’s the process we have to go through.”

His remarks aligned with First Bank’s legacy of adaptation. With over 130 years of history, the bank has consistently reinvented itself in response to evolving market forces, making iterative innovation a cornerstone of its approach to digital transformation.

As the world’s largest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) commands 31 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market, maintaining its lead amid increasing competition from Microsoft Azure (24 percent) and Google Cloud (11 percent). AWS currently supports more than 1.45 million active customers across sectors including retail, media, and financial services.

Vogels explained that Amazon’s dominance came not from off-the-shelf solutions, but from building custom systems designed to scale. “When I joined Amazon, I thought, ‘It’s a bookshop, a web server, a database, how hard can that be?’” he said. “But there was no commercial software that could operate at our scale. We had to build everything ourselves.”

Rachael Adeshina echoed the need for continuous reinvention. “Like most organisations, we’re constantly evolving,” she said. “We’re leveraging technology to deliver financial services, and at the heart of it all is our commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction.”

In recent years, First Bank has pivoted aggressively towards digital banking to keep pace with rising consumer expectations and regulatory reforms. Under the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) directives, banks must ensure local data residency, even as they pursue global cloud partnerships for agility and innovation. “If we are to partner with AWS,” Adeshina noted, “it means that now or shortly, we will be hosting some of our workload with AWS.”

Africa’s cloud computing market is poised for rapid expansion, forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 25.98 percent between 2025 and 2030 to reach $3.28 billion, according to Mordor Intelligence. Nigeria’s market alone is projected to hit $1.03 billion in 2025, up from an estimated $760 million in 2024, driven by the spread of 5G and investments in undersea cables.

First Bank’s engagement with AWS positions it to ride this growth wave while navigating Nigeria’s unique regulatory landscape.

At the core of Amazon’s philosophy, Vogels emphasised, is customer obsession. “We build from the customer backwards,” he said. “If something breaks on a Sunday and the engineer has two options, one that saves money and one that delights the customer, they’ll never be faulted for choosing the latter.”

This customer-first mentality, famously championed by Jeff Bezos in his 1997 letter to shareholders, prioritises long-term loyalty over short-term profit, a principle that continues to shape Amazon’s decisions today.

On the topic of artificial intelligence, Vogels addressed common misconceptions. “Most of my customers don’t know what AI is,” he said. “But if you’ve ever used our recommendation engine on Amazon.com, you’ve been using AI for 30 years, we just didn’t call it that.”

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Generative AI is now central to cloud strategies worldwide. AWS introduced its Nova foundation model on Bedrock in late 2024 and integrated DeepSeek’s R1 model into both Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker by early 2025. These developments reflect Amazon’s belief that “data is the oxygen of AI.” As Vogels put it, “Without data, AI is nothing.”

He illustrated this point by referencing an AWS initiative supporting smallholder rice farmers in Asia. “Many of these farmers didn’t have smartphones, so a voice-based system was built. They could call in, describe their land, and get tailored advice, how much to plant, where to sell, all through voice. Not everyone can read or write, but everyone can speak.”

Security and operational excellence were also key themes. “When architecting software, you should think about two things: how do I operate it, and how do I secure it?” he said. “Security is non-negotiable.”

In 2024, AWS revamped its internal infrastructure to eliminate single points of failure, ensuring that even data-centre outages are invisible to users. That year, global spending on cloud infrastructure rose 19 percent year-on-year to $78.2 billion, much of it driven by AI-related investments.

Vogels concluded with advice for First Bank: “You must keep that day-one hunger alive, the scrappy, experimental mindset that drives invention. Because every year, technology evolves. If you remain stuck in your ways, you’ll be 75 percent less performant than if you choose the right technology for the problem.”