● Success story · Fintech · AWS managed services
A payments platform: 42% lower AWS costs at 99.99% uptime.
With Stratum running its AWS as a managed service, a 24/7 payments platform took 65% of engineering time back from infrastructure work and grew from 400K to 2M monthly transactions without a single compliance finding.
01 The company
A digital payments platform that moves money around the clock: instant transfers and payroll processing, every day of the year, in one of the most regulated sectors there is.
02 The goal
From reactive firefighting to proactive innovation.
The team wanted a managed services partner to take over the heavy lifting of AWS infrastructure, security and ongoing compliance. The targets: four nines of uptime and unit economics that improve with scale, so in-house engineers could get back to building financial products.
03 The challenge
Four problems, all growing with volume.
- Compliance burdenPCI-DSS and audit work ate about a third of engineering time.
- Zero-downtime needsInstant payments cannot fail at 3am on a holiday. Availability had to be 24/7/365.
- Cost inefficiencyThe AWS bill grew faster than revenue, with no clear plan to optimize it.
- Security gapsSecurity alerts were handled after the fact, slowing releases and piling up work.
04 The solution
A managed services framework built for fintech.
We built a DevSecOps pipeline that runs security scans and produces compliance evidence automatically, so audits became a routine check instead of a sprint.
Transaction-level observability and alerting, a 24/7 on-call rotation and a dedicated FinOps plan stabilised unit economics and took operations off the developers’ plate.
05 Technical execution
What we built on AWS.
Containerized microservices run on Amazon ECS, with AWS Lambda for event-driven processing. Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) with Multi-AZ deployment keeps data integrity, and Amazon DynamoDB holds session state. AWS Shield Advanced, WAF and KMS deliver banking-standard encryption and protection.
Terraform keeps every deployment auditable and consistent. Disaster recovery uses cross-region replication with a sub-5-minute RTO, and AWS Audit Manager with CloudTrail automate evidence collection for PCI-DSS and SOC 2.
- Amazon ECS
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL, Multi-AZ)
- Amazon DynamoDB
- AWS Shield Advanced
- AWS WAF
- AWS KMS
- Terraform
- Datadog
- AWS Audit Manager
- AWS CloudTrail
06 Results
Ten outcomes, measured.
- Reliability99.99% uptime, around an hour of downtime a year.
- EfficiencyAWS costs cut by 42% through FinOps and right-sizing.
- Productivity65% of engineering time reclaimed from infrastructure and compliance work.
- VelocityFeature deployment 4× faster, from quarterly to monthly releases.
- ComplianceSOC 2 Type II reached ahead of plan.
- ScalabilityFrom 400K to 2M monthly transactions without incidents.
- PerformanceAverage transaction processing under 250ms.
- Security75% fewer security incidents through automated responses.
- RecoveryMTTR down from 40 minutes to under 6.
- Business impactBetter unit economics: cost per transaction falls as volume grows.
Security is now built into how we ship, and the cost reduction won over our CFO. We stopped fighting fires and started planning.
07 What’s next
From vendor to strategic partner.
Next on the roadmap: meeting new regional financial standards through configuration rather than code, more real-time transparency for customers, and monitoring that ties technical performance straight to revenue goals.
08 More stories
More results, same team.
● Next step
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