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2023

Matera processes 10% of Brazil's Pix transactions in an AWS environment

An AWS customer for over ten years, Matera created its Pix solution using the AWS cloud and services, such as the Amazon Aurora database (DB), which today processes 10% of the country's instant payments

Overview | Breaking new ground in creating payment methods

Matera Systems was created in 1987 with the objective of transforming its clients’ business and making access to financial services democratic. Throughout its history, the company has established itself as one of the leaders in the development of financial solutions in the Brazilian market. It offers a complete core banking platform that integrates all functionalities needed for the operation of financial institutions. This platform is maintained with constant updates and in line with the main local regulatory guidelines.

Managing this portfolio of solutions means closely monitoring the Central Bank's definitions and their evolution. To achieve this, Matera has been an AWS customer for over ten years and is one of the first financial solution developers in the country to create critical cloud solutions. The company's president, Ricardo Chisman, recalls that Matera's first cloud solutions arrived on the market in 2010. “That's why, as we entered 2019, we were already familiar with, understood and trusted the environment,” he says.

That year, the company began developing its solution for Pix. “Working on building the Pix using AWS’ support was a process within the partnership’s evolution,” he says, recalling that the project was born with the movement to expand financial solutions in Brazil. Chisman stresses that Pix is part of the expansion context of payment institutions, the creation of fintechs and the entire framework developed around the opening of the financial sector. “It was an opportunity that Matera saw when it started working with innovation in financial services,” he says.

In this sense, the company was one of the major contributors to the Pix construction process, from the conception of what would become the SPI. Precisely for this reason, it was one of the first to create solutions for this payment method, developing a product that implements it, providing support to financial institutions and fintechs that wanted to participate in the instant payment system.

A small business owner wearing an apron processes a payment with a card reader for a customer in a restaurant or cafe setting, illustrating business productivity tools for SMBs.

About Matera

Founded in 1987, Matera Systems has become a leader in the field of creating solutions to offer financial services and products to the market. They provide a complete core banking platform, playing a significant role in access to this type of service more democratic.

Opportunity | Working as a team and remotely

As a natural evolution of the Matera platform, the Pix solution was also developed using the AWS cloud and services. Matera's product director, Bruno Samora, recalls that the product was launched in 2020, after more than a year of intense development. “It was a challenging project in the technological sense, with constant modifications. It also had a tight deadline, and very rapid growth after its launch. AWS was essential for us to achieve the agility, flexibility, and scalability needed for the project’s success and to be ready in time for the Pix’s market launch,” he says.

The executive explains that the application was built on a Kubernetes-based microservices architecture aiming for high scalability and resilience, which was fundamental to the success of the project. “We used AWS services intensively and consciously seeking the best solution for each of the project’s needs. The Amazon Aurora database (DB), for example, was the only one capable of delivering the performance required by the application,” he says.

Samora also highlights the circumstances under which the project was developed, with a large part of the team working remotely. “The pandemic shaped our way of working and the fact that we had several employees obtaining AWS certification was an important accelerator and a critical success factor, allowing collaboration in this environment and the effective use of resources,” he says. Thus, Matera was the first to place an actual project during the Central Bank's go-live.

Solution | Keeping up with the pace of evolution

According to Chisman, around 10% of the Pix transactions completed in Brazil today are processed through Matera solutions supported by the AWS environment. This represents more than 350 million monthly transactions carried out within the availability and processing time requirements established by the Central Bank (less than 2 seconds). For comparison, this monthly volume exceeds all the instant payment processing carried out in the American market by The Clearing House's RTP solution.

“The project has already demonstrated the scalability necessary to support hundreds of millions of Pix transactions running in parallel,” celebrates Chisman, thinking ahead about the evolution of the instant payment method. He states that Matera currently has a roadmap with an intense agenda for the end of this year and next, which includes new versions, new construct and new functionalities to support all of the innovation required by the Brazilian financial market. “Here we have all of AWS’ scalability and security features, which allow us to develop and run this efficiently,” he says.

Part of this evolution includes the development of new versions of the solution already running on AWS Graviton processors, which have a 30% higher performance than the previous ones. In addition, previous versions, and other company applications, are also being migrated to the new processor, meeting Matera's cost reduction and carbon emission goals. “Our goal is to reduce our carbon footprint in more than 20% and this is one of the paths we are taking to that end. It also reduces costs,” says the president.

Chisman recalls that Matera currently uses practically all of the AWS cloud functionalities to guarantee the scalability and security of its environment. “We are witnessing an explosion of instant payments and we need a solution that will allow us to keep up. Today we have a very well designed product that gives us the scalability we need for this,” he says.

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It was a process of evolving the partnership to work on building Pix using AWS support.

Ricardo Chisman

President of Matera

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