Executive Summary

As a leading fintech provider specializing in digital payment solutions, our client processes millions of transactions daily across Europe. The Matoffo team developed a comprehensive Infrastructure as Code solution leveraging AWS services that enables the client to automate manual processes and achieve maximum operational efficiency while optimizing costs.

About the Customer

The client is a rapidly growing fintech company specializing in digital payment solutions. Their platform processes millions of transactions daily, serving both business and consumer customers across Europe. The company provides innovative payment processing, digital wallet solutions, and financial management tools, requiring a robust, secure, and highly available infrastructure to maintain their 24/7 operations.

Customer Challenge

A rapidly growing European fintech company specializing in digital payment solutions faced a critical DevOps bottleneck that directly impacted their business performance. Their manual infrastructure provisioning and deployment process was causing:

• Extended release cycles of 3-4 weeks, preventing them from quickly responding to market demands and compliance requirements
• A 40% deployment failure rate due to environment inconsistencies between development and production

The most significant business impact came when the company missed a critical 48-hour window to deploy a mandatory security patch required by the EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2), resulting in a temporary processing restriction that cost €78,000 in transaction fees and damaged relationships with three key banking partners.

Why AWS

AWS is the perfect technology foundation for implementing a robust digital payment platform. Its comprehensive suite of services, coupled with scalability, cost optimization, security capabilities, and a robust support ecosystem, ensures that the implementation process aligns perfectly with the client’s financial technology requirements.

AWS provides an extensive array of services specifically designed for financial operations, including Amazon ECS for containerized applications, Aurora for highly available databases, and ElastiCache for improved performance. Furthermore, AWS’s built-in security features and compliance tools help maintain adherence to industry standards like PCI DSS, which is crucial for payment processing operations.

Why Matoffo

When it comes to selecting a trustworthy cloud development provider for critical financial systems, customers often struggle to find a perfect match in the modern oversaturated market. Luckily, the Matoffo team comes to help here.

Backed by years of experience delivering cutting-edge cloud solutions that lead companies to success, we came up with an efficient DevOps implementation that exceeded our client’s expectations. The ideal mesh of our hands-on experience in financial services and creative approach to solving infrastructure challenges set a robust foundation for fruitful business cooperation. Our proven track record in implementing AWS solutions, particularly in the fintech sector, made us the ideal partner for this digital payment platform transformation.

Matoffo Solution

We implemented a comprehensive DevOps transformation focused on infrastructure automation and deployment standardization:

1. Infrastructure as Code Foundation:
   • Created modular Terraform configurations for networking, application components, and databases to ensure consistent environments
   • Established state management using S3 and DynamoDB for locking to prevent concurrent modification issues
   • Implemented AWS Parameter Store integration for secure, environment-specific configuration management
2. Multi-Stage CI/CD Pipeline:
   • Local Development:
     • Implemented pre-commit hooks to catch code style and security issues early
     • Created containerized local testing environments that mirrored production configurations
   • QA Environment (Pull Request):
     • Automated security scanning with Dependabot to identify vulnerabilities
     • Enforced code quality gates with SonarQube and ESLint
     • Ran unit tests using Jest to validate basic functionality
     • Automated infrastructure provisioning with Terraform
     • Containerized application deployments to ECS for consistent testing
   • Development Environment (Merge to Main):
     • Implemented standardized image tagging for version tracking
     • Automated Terraform apply to ensure environment consistency
     • Deployed to ECS with automated smoke tests to verify stability
   • Staging Environment (Release Creation):
     • Created production-like environment with Terraform
     • Performed comprehensive testing including API tests, load testing with Locust, and end-to-end testing
     • Verified PSD2 compliance requirements with specialized test suites
   • Production Environment (Manual Approval):
     • Implemented blue/green deployment strategy in ECS to eliminate downtime
     • Created post-deployment validation with Datadog alerts and synthetic transactions
     • Established automated rollback capabilities based on predefined health metrics

High-level solution diagram

High-level deployment diagram

CI/CD diagram

Business Value

The DevOps transformation delivered measurable business improvements:

• Release Cycle Performance:
  • Reduced from 3-4 weeks to 3 days
  • Increased deployment frequency from monthly to weekly releases
  • Enabled emergency security patches to be deployed within 2 hours instead of days
• Environment Management:
  • Decreased environment provisioning time from 3 days to 45 minutes
  • Reduced environment configuration differences to near-zero through Terraform modules
• Deployment Quality:
  • Improved deployment success rate from 60% to 95%

The most telling success indicator was the company’s ability to respond to an urgent EU regulatory change in payment processing rules within 24 hours – a timeline that would have been impossible under their previous process.

We conducted a detailed TCO analysis to quantify the financial impact of implementing the DevOps pipeline for this mid-sized fintech company:

Direct Infrastructure Savings

• Previous infrastructure spend: €17,500/month for over-provisioned environments across Dev, QA, Stage, and Production
• New containerized approach with standardized environments: €10,500/month (40% reduction)

Client's Feedback

“Matoffo’s Infrastructure as Code solution has transformed our operations. The automation and standardization they implemented have not only improved our efficiency but also significantly enhanced our security posture. Their expertise in AWS DevOps practices has been instrumental in achieving our operational excellence goals.” – Chief Technology Officer

This case study demonstrates Matoffo’s expertise in implementing DevOps practices and AWS services to create a robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure solution. By addressing the complex needs of a growing fintech company, Matoffo delivered a platform that significantly enhances operational efficiency, improves security, and enables sustainable growth in the digital payments industry.