Thai lender uses AI workflows and human oversight to modernize legacy core banking infrastructure

How does a major bank in Thailand modernize core infrastructure with AI to stay resilient amid rapid digitalization and evolving customer expectations, while achieving faster time-to-value with managed services partners?

Thailand’s fifth-largest bank by assets is overhauling the technology that underpins its core banking operations, aiming to keep pace with a rapidly changing financial system and shifting customer expectations.

On 10 September 2026, the Bank of Ayudhya PCL (Kungsri) announced a renewed five-year managed-services agreement to strengthen the resilience and efficiency of its data center environment, including its systems supporting more than 4,800 ATMs nationwide.

As it pushes deeper into digital channels, the bank’s challenge is to modernize legacy infrastructure without disrupting daily operations, while reducing manual IT workloads, improving monitoring, and optimizing batch processing. The transformation program will deploy:

  • Managed services and consulting for data centre and core-banking infrastructure
  • An AI-powered integration and automation platform to orchestrate workflows across applications and infrastructure
  • Mainframe capacity and operational support delivered as a service, alongside application modernization.
  • Agentic AI–based automation for operational tasks, infrastructure analysis and targeted modernization, with human oversight retained

Kenichi Yamato, the bank’s President and CEO, said the industry is being reshaped by “technological progress, changing customer expectations, regulatory shifts, and new financial models”, adding that the institution needs IT infrastructure that is “resilient, flexible, and scalable”.  He described the transformation with the managed services partner as a means to “further modernize our IT infrastructure” while keeping “customer-centricity and personalized solutions at the heart of everything we do”.

According to Kittipong Asawapichayon, Managing Director, Kyndryl Thailand, the managed services provider in the transformation, the engagement combines an understanding of the bank’s environment with consulting, automation and AI expertise to support “the data center infrastructure behind the bank’s core operations, including its nationwide operation network.” 

This case study describes digitalization that prioritizes operational resilience over disruptive re-platforming.