SecurionPay Manages Complex Online Payments, Scales to 300% Growth Using AWS

SecurionPay runs an online credit card payment platform that handles 1 out of every 1,500 transactions worldwide for Mastercard and Visa. The company combines the latest technology with customer-centric user experience to create a product that is optimized to meet future needs. It facilitates complex payments for both low- and high-risk global merchants. 

Since chargebacks, fraud, and failed payments can hamper revenue growth if not managed properly, the company has a security-first approach. Maintaining the highest possible level of data security for fast, increasing volumes of transactions is central to its business. 

SecurionPay turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a secure platform that can reliably process millions of concurrent transactions and support the company’s 300 percent year-on-year growth. It also developed a flexible architecture that promotes innovation so that it can offer new payment options to merchants to boost their sales conversions.

Global merchants require scalable resources to ensure they have the capacity to meet variable buyer demand and process payments in a timely fashion. 

SecurionPay built a payment platform relying on 60–70 AWS services. “Using AWS, we can scale to meet demand, and we were profitable within 6 months of launching the business,” says Lucas Jankowiak, CEO and co-founder at SecurionPay. 

SecurionPay supports flexible payment options such as one-click upgrades, offers, cancellations, and upsales for customers, while providing secure authentication. Drawing upon AWS services, SecurionPay provides a checkout process that is 2–4 minutes faster than previously, because customers avoid redirecting payments to third-party websites and reduce the number of forms to fill out. Such improvement in convenience contributed to increased customer sales conversions by an average of 19 percent, and overall sales by 22 percent. “Passing the benefits of our secure and scalable service to our customers gives us a competitive advantage,” says Jankowiak.

SecurionPay wanted to maintain its customer experience standards while rapidly growing its customer base. To do this, the company decided to draw from real-time insights based on its customer behavior. It used Amazon Redshift for its fast, easy, and secure cloud data warehousing. It also reached for Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) tool for creating dashboards. 

Within 3 months of migrating to AWS, employees from across the business—from operations to sales—were using data-driven insights to make decisions. For example, the risk team can now easily drill down into the details of suspicious events without involving the data analytics team, speeding up time to resolution. They can also quickly spin up dashboards on topics such as merchants, regions, or traffic-per-card issuer. Reports that previously took hours are now almost instantaneous, delivering timely insights. 

In turn, its merchant customers benefit from the comprehensive BI tool that allows them to easily group and filter transactions, giving them better information about their businesses. 

Time-effectiveness goes hand in hand with cost decrease. Costs were reduced by up to 90 percent, since SecurionPay began using AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, and Amazon Kinesis, making it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data.

Highly effective anti-fraud features are essential to quickly spotting fraudulent charges and taking the necessary action. 

Close cooperation with the AWS account team facilitated the development of an alerting system based on Amazon QuickSight. The system spots every abnormal behavior in the traffic and immediately notifies customers about the event. "This is exactly what we needed. We had an idea of how to do it, but AWS suggested we build a custom engine, which we did," says Szymon Święcki, DevOps engineer at SecurionPay. "Our workshops with AWS have been super helpful." To implement the highest standards, SecurionPay has based its multi-layered approach to security on AWS. Using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) made it easy to create and manage cryptographic keys, saving the IT team time for maintenance and backup tasks. The company has needed less time to complete the Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance audit process. Reducing 3 days to half a day has freed up the team to focus on innovation.

SecurionPay has improved the efficiency of product development using AWS DevOps tools. The team set up a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that delivers daily product updates, so customers always have access to the latest features. 

The development platform is consistent and designed for 99.995 percent reliability, helping developers to test and build new services and address bespoke merchant requirements. “Using AWS, we can adapt and change our services fast,” says Jankowiak. “If any errors occur, we can fix them and roll out improvements immediately. This flexibility adds to our competitive advantage—the sky is the limit.”