Flutterwave Case Study

Startup Flutterwave saves $120,000 a year and cuts the time for onboarding customers by more than 60 percent by using AWS and moving to serverless computing. Flutterwave develops payment solutions for businesses and people in Africa. The code for Flutterwave’s payment solutions runs on AWS Lambda.

Fintech startup Flutterwave is a payment solutions technology firm. The business has developed a payments infrastructure to make it easier for businesses and individuals to make and receive digital payments across the world.

Since launching in 2016, the company has processed 100 million transactions worth $5.4 billion for businesses such as Uber, TransferWise, and Flywire.

Flutterwave was born on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. To reduce costs and increase agility, it redeveloped its application code for serverless AWS Lambda functions.

Today, hundreds of AWS Lambda functions enable core Flutterwave processes. These include integration between Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure and card partners such as Visa, as well as other financial institutions.

The company uses AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to support the issuance of settlement reports on payment transactions. Several times a day, API calls are routed by AWS Lambda via the Amazon API Gateway to Amazon SQS, which sends out emails to settlement teams with links to the reports stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.

Nujinim Egwegbete-Odukwu, IT security and infrastructure analyst at Flutterwave, says, “By running our code for key processes on AWS Lambda, we have reduced our infrastructure costs by $120,000 a year.”

Flutterwave IT personnel have cut the time for onboarding new business customers by more than 60 percent. The IT team builds web dashboards for new customers to see the number and kinds of payment transactions taking place via Flutterwave payment solutions.

Nujinim says, “In the past, we had to log dashboard projects with information such as the server configurations we wanted to use and wait for approval. The entire process could take five days. Because of the cost-effectiveness of AWS Lambda, we no longer need approvals and the onboarding process can take less than two days.”