Moneytree Uses AWS Marketplace Private Offers for Cost and Resource Savings

Financial technology company Moneytree KK (Moneytree) seeks to help consumers “unlock the power of data for good” by offering a data-sharing solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Wanting to simplify the payment process for the third-party solutions that Moneytree uses, the company turned to AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for organizations to discover, procure, entitle, provision, and govern third-party software. By using AWS Marketplace, Moneytree has realized significant time and cost savings and can invest more resources into engineering and product design.

Since its start in 2012, Moneytree has been using AWS. Based in Japan, the cloud-native company’s goal is to help its consumers gain control of their financial lives. With a team of five, the company built a personal financial management app and a data sharing solution on AWS, which launched in 2013 after just 1 year of development. “That wouldn’t have been possible without using AWS for infrastructure,” says Ross Sharrott, founder and chief architect of Moneytree. “Using AWS, we can off-load the heavy lifting of monitoring, operating, and scaling, and we’re able to focus more of our time on business differentiators,” Sharrott says. “We’ve never needed an operations team.”

As of 2021, these services are used by over five million consumers and over 80 clients.

By moving third-party payment relationships with existing vendors to AWS Marketplace, Moneytree was able to reduce the burden on its financial team by creating a unique identity and access management finance role to combine all invoices at once, instead of many roles in many environments. “We spend less money because of the billing integration through AWS Marketplace, and that has also sped up the process of reviewing and approving procedures,” says Sharrott.

The company realized it could get better terms from vendors and further simplify the software procurement process by using AWS Marketplace private offers, a feature that lets businesses receive product pricing that isn’t publicly available. Moneytree was the first Japanese customer to purchase multiple products from AWS Independent Software Vendors through this program. Using AWS Marketplace private offers, Moneytree purchased near-real-time database service Redis Enterprise Cloud and third-party monitoring service Sumo Logic Monitoring and Analytics Platform, which it has been using since October 2020. “Through AWS Marketplace private offers, software procurement has an easy signing process,” says Sharrott. “It doesn’t require a huge amount of interaction with vendors.”

As the scope of Moneytree’s services continues to expand, it plans to use the machine learning capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, which helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality machine learning models quickly. Moneytree is also building a data lake, which will help it improve its products over time and make its operations even smoother. “We want to help customers and clients use the data that’s coming through our sharing service,” says Sharrott. “Using AWS solutions will help us do that.”