Zeta Powers Population-Scale Digital Banking and Saves Millions of Dollars in Capital Costs Using AWS

Zeta offers cloud-native, next-generation card issuing and transaction processing solutions for financial services providers globally. Zeta’s omni-stack platform helps banks modernize by replacing inflexible mainframe technology with highly scalable and reliable cloud-based systems. The platform supports next-generation banking services around deposit management, credit, debit and prepaid card processing, loan administration, and mobile banking services. Ramki Gaddipati, cofounder and CTO at Zeta, says, “We help banks rapidly scale critical capabilities such as real-time transaction processing, end-of-day processing, and always-on availability—delivering solutions that are reliable and cost-effective.”

The Zeta platform went live on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015. Since then, the platform has evolved to include the Tachyon Suite as a SaaS offering, providing flexible tools for banking operations, and Olympus as a PaaS solution, enabling seamless integration and customization for banks. 

Zeta identified end-of-day (EOD) processing as a critical problem for banks to solve to be able to unlock scale in their credit business. EOD processing is a complex and resource-hungry task that involves billing, interest calculations, fees, statements, and account status updates across millions of accounts. EOD processing is not only crucial for compliance but also has significant cost impact due to the scale of infrastructure involved.

In traditional architectures, EOD processing often creates operational bottlenecks, limiting compliance efficiency and delaying new product development. Zeta needed a scalable EOD solution capable of processing millions of credit accounts with low latency, meeting regulatory requirements, and freeing up millions in infrastructure capital expenses. Says Shaik Idris, senior director of Tachyon EOD, “Our goal was to remove barriers associated with EOD processing, freeing banks to drive new products at population scale.”

The Zeta Technology team designed a highly scalable cloud-native solution combining microservices, distributed systems, and big data. The solution’s architecture features Apache Flink, a unified stream- and batch-processing framework, and Apache Kafka, which supports high throughputs for real-time data feeds. The team used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run the services and scale them by processing Flink and Kafka platforms automatically.

To optimize the EOD processing architecture’s storage for maximal performance, Zeta decided to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Express One Zone, which Zeta’s tech team had discovered during AWS re:Invent. Says Praveen Irrinki, senior director of Engineering at Zeta, “Amazon S3 has been part of the backbone of our platform from the beginning. When we learned about S3 Express One Zone, we immediately recognized its potential for handling large file transfers in a short time.”

Working closely with its AWS account team, the Zeta engineering team connected with S3 Express One Zone experts at AWS to understand the service in detail. “Using S3 Express One Zone, we could handle huge volumes of data without the cost of maintaining a large storage infrastructure. Plus, it gave us very low, single-digit millisecond latency to process high numbers of transactions in a timely manner,” says Praveen Irrinki. To complete the architecture, the team added Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for the platform’s database services and Amazon Athena to analyze petabytes of data from multiple sources.

Zeta’s AWS architecture demonstrated the ability to scale to 23,000-plus Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, launching over 4,200 Amazon EKS pods and 126 Amazon RDS instances in minutes. “It was a testament to the flexibility of AWS and a reminder of what customers can achieve in the cloud,” comments Praveen Irrinki.

After going live, the AWS architecture for Zeta’s EOD processing services could process 208 million credit card accounts in 40 minutes, execute 10,000 banking transaction authorizations per second, and produce 40 million statements in just 5 minutes. Amit Goyal, technical architect at Zeta, comments, “Our end-of-day processing capabilities outperform even the top mainframe infrastructures available on the market. Our solution on AWS eliminates the need for a $90 million upfront investment in on-premises infrastructure and reduces costs to under $500 per day instead.”

Following the infrastructure enhancement on AWS, Zeta’s financial services customers can develop and scale their digital banking services while ensuring they have the backend capabilities to meet all daily processing and compliance requirements. Zeta’s platform also gives them real-time processing capabilities and flexible performance to support millions of digital interactions per day, enhancing user experience. Amit Goyal says, "With our platform built on AWS, we've seen financial service providers launch highly performant and reliable credit card apps that deliver exceptional customer satisfaction."

Zeta customers worldwide are leveraging the platform to launch multiple digital products at a population scale. “We’ve shown that our platform built on AWS can support the current digital workloads of even the largest US banks,” comments Ramki Gaddipati. “We support customers that operate 10 million debit and credit cards. If that rose to 100 million or even 200 million tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a problem for our platform.”

Zeta is already working with several of the leading banks in the US. With the continued development of its platform on AWS, the company aims to work with many more. “With the flexibility of our technology, banks can not only deliver their digital programs but also manage their costs and adapt easily to a changing regulatory environment," Shaik Idris concludes.