Mobileware’s ‘Bank in a Box’ Scales to Meet Rising Demand for Digital Payments

Mobileware Technologies chose to host its flagship TransXT product, also known as Bank in a Box, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). For more than 10 years, Mobileware has been building innovative digital payment solutions for banking and financial services clients in India.

TransXT offers a cost-effective method for scaling digital payments, in addition to reliable transaction processing speeds that exceed regulatory requirements. Banks using the service benefit from proven compliance with data security protocols and a shorter time-to-market compared to on-premises payment processing solutions.

Most banks in India use colocated or owned data centers for their IT infrastructure. But after demonetization occurred in 2016 Mobileware noted a rising rate of payment failure among its clients. It began investigating and discovered that most issues could be traced to legacy bank hardware that wasn’t designed for quick scaling. As Mobileware began building the TransXT system in 2018 on AWS, it was able to scale database instances more efficiently than in an on-premises environment. Upgrading instances in the data center usually took one month and always required downtime, whereas on AWS, the process takes just minutes.

In 2020, Mobileware onboarded its first TransXT customer. Recognizing that digital banking success hinges on the ability to meet the rapidly growing demand for payments, a leading bank in India tasked Mobileware with fully managing its domestic remittances. Since the bank started using TransXT, its number of successful monthly remittances quadrupled from 0.5 million to 2 million.

TransXT customers are also able to consistently meet or exceed the regulatory requirement for processing 800–900 transactions per second (TPS). In an on-premises computing model, banks would need to buy excess hardware to prepare for spikes in payment demand and pay for security licensing on each server. With TransXT on AWS, customers benefit from a pay-per-use model that saves capital investment.

Furthermore, regulations in India stipulate that banks post a decline (failure) rate under 1 percent of their total transaction volume each day. If a payment doesn’t go through in 30 seconds, it’s considered a decline. The Ministry of Finance flags failed transactions and fines banks whose decline rate exceeds the daily 1 percent threshold.

Mobileware markets its TransXT product as having the “highest transaction success rate.” The decline rate for payments made using TransXT is about 0.2 percent, so banks lower their risk of failed transactions and associated penalties. The response time for confirming digital payments is half a second—well below the 30-second regulatory limit.

TransXT customers also benefit from a lower time-to-market for launching and scaling digital payment systems. In the case of TransXT’s first banking customer, internal IT teams had been struggling with complex approval processes that limited agility. They had been working on a digital payment solution for a year-and-a-half but were unable to bring the solution to market from the data center. Once Mobileware stepped in, the bank’s remittance solution on TransXT went live in under 90 days.

Before onboarding new banking customers, Mobileware must prove TransXT conforms to rigid security checklists and is compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). “The AWS team played a large role in answering our first banking customer’s security questions. With their help, we could ease any apprehension the bank had about putting financial workloads on AWS,” says Carlin Crasto, lead solutions architect at Mobileware Technologies.

Mobileware built TransXT using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in the AWS Cloud. It uses Amazon Aurora as the database foundation for TransXT and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to automate database management. “The main advantage we get from Amazon Aurora is the low-latency read replicas used for data querying,” Crasto says. “All of these queries that are fetching transaction data no longer touch the bank’s primary database; they can run on a read-only database. While this is possible in the data center, it would likely increase the cost tenfold due to the complex licensing and infrastructure fixes required. With Amazon Aurora instances in the AWS Cloud, we can get better performance for the same cost, or even less, than in the data center.”

Using Amazon Aurora further improves application performance as Mobileware has higher visibility into logs. Engineers monitor slow-query and error logs constantly to make performance adjustments and better understand how the system behaves during peak load periods.

To address banks’ questions regarding data localization and data privacy on the AWS Cloud, AWS provides a detailed explanation on its data storage in India through the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Backups and business continuity are assured thanks to three separate Availability Zones (AZs) within the Region and Mobileware leverages multi-AZ deployment for TransXT database instances. In terms of privacy, AWS and Mobileware highlight the shared responsibility model and native access controls on AWS that ensure only the owners of each account can view transaction data.

By choosing TransXT, financial institutions open the door to further digital enhancements on a cloud-native infrastructure. “Banks usually have a difficult path to accessing modern technologies such as Kubernetes, but moving with technology is suddenly possible in an AWS environment,” Crasto concludes.

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