Hubtel Boosts Revenue 20x and Saves $1.5 Million on Infrastructure Using AWS

Hubtel developed a mobile payments platform that lets Ghanaian residents find and pay for everyday essentials. Founded in 2005, the platform facilitates transactions between sellers and consumers, supporting 262,000 daily active users, 2.2 million monthly active users, and 10 million daily [JO1] transactions. It processes 8.3 percent of all successful mobile money payments made in Ghana.

As Hubtel grew, its infrastructure evolved from being on-premises to using co-location services[ZM2] in Europe. But despite making these changes, it was still experiencing problems with scaling and reliability. Provisioning new capacity could take days or even weeks. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of its products was resulting in traffic spikes, causing its platform to overload and leaving it unusable for many customers.

At first, Hubtel would waste money by over-provisioning its resources to try and cope with demand. But in 2017, Francis Wilson, head of infrastructure at Hubtel[MK3] , decided to look for a better solution. “With payments, if there’s a delay or the transaction times out, we lose customers’ trust. That’s unacceptable in this business,” he says. “We finally accepted that to scale the way the business required—we needed a big change. That’s when we started looking at AWS.”

Out of the several cloud providers it evaluated, Hubtel chose AWS because of its reputation for reliability and its diverse range of managed services. The Hubtel Infrastructure team took online courses to transfer their skills from on-premises maintenance to using AWS. “We learned how other companies had made similar migrations,” says Wilson. “There’s so much information available, we were able to teach ourselves to use AWS and implement best practices.”

The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For its storage and database needs, it chose Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud.It then migrated its main application using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes on AWS. “Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS are used to store all of our customer and corporate information,” says Wilson. “We containerized our payments platform with Amazon EKS and use Amazon EC2 for all our compute requirements.”

The entire project took 10 months[MK1] , and Alex Bram, CEO at Hubtel, is proud of how his team used AWS to turn the business around. [D2] In 2018, annual revenue was about $3 million, and the company was losing customers. In its first full year after migrating to AWS, its revenue increased 4 times to $12 million—and continued to grow to 20 times in the following years to $62 million. Hubtel has seen performance boosted 100 times [AL3] compared to its previous infrastructure and its IT team spends less time managing the infrastructure and can focus more on new features for its platform[MK4] . “We’ve become the biggest and most popular payment provider in Ghana, and that’s all down to using AWS,” says Bram.

With its application and infrastructure now optimized on AWS, Hubtel plans to make more use of serverless technologies to help drive expansion. “There are a lot of advantages to using serverless,” says Wilson. “Although now we can already scale to match demand, serverless takes us to a new level of innovation.”

Using AWS has transformed Hubtel’s business, according to Wilson. The company saves $1.5 million a year on infrastructure costs compared to its previous on-premises environment, and its customers are happier because the service is now reliable. “If you compare our reliability, performance, and prospects as a business, there have been vast improvements since we started using AWS,” says Wilson.

The next challenge for Hubtel is to build a data lake and use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create business insights to develop its services further. “We want to use AI to accelerate the pace of change,” says Bram. “We have terabytes of data, but we’re not yet able to use it to our advantage. That will change with our next step on AWS.”