Nium Transforms Cross-Border Payments with More Than 99.99% Uptime

To create an advanced global payments platform, Nium recognized the need for a payment infrastructure that offered three fundamental qualities: simplicity, scalability, and speed. The driving force behind this was a problem that Nium’s CEO Prajit Nanu had encountered while organizing an overseas event. The straightforward task of sending a small deposit to a resort turned into a convoluted process of bank transfers and paperwork.

Mr. Nanu's experience highlighted a larger issue: international money transfers were unnecessarily complex and slow. Customers were also burdened with high exchange fees. These issues were exacerbated during peak periods like salary payments and promotional events, when transaction volumes could increase two- to threefold. Nium needed a solution to address this growing demand.

To meet this challenge, the company envisaged an infrastructure that was fast, could scale to accommodate peak periods, and had zero downtime. Additionally, Nium prioritized security and compliance. The company also acknowledged the need to adapt to diverse markets worldwide, providing payment reference data to meet specific regional demands.

 In another vital consideration, the company had to account for the global trend toward real-time outward remittances. Furthermore, Nium would have to manage 65–70 integrations with banks and payment providers, which made having a robust and flexible infrastructure essential.

Nium has successfully grown its payments platform from just supporting payouts to 20 countries in 2017 to 190 countries as of November 2023, building on AWS. It can also easily support up to seven times more payout and 10 times more card transactions each day, as compared to the volume and scale the system is managing today. Furthermore, the system maintains a low latency of a few milliseconds for its card issuance systems.

Nium relies on Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed API service, to integrate its cross-border payment services with various clearing systems worldwide. With Amazon API Gateway, Nium only needs to manage a single standardized API connection. This simplifies the integration process between businesses, various payment networks, and financial institutions, reducing friction and facilitating the platform’s expansion into global markets.

Nium also deployed Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS). Amazon ECS, a fully managed container orchestration service automatically deploys, manages, and scales containerized applications based on load patterns, traffic patterns, and seasonal demands, without over-provisioning. Alongside this, Amazon EKS, a managed Kubernetes service works to make sure all various parts of Nium’s payments platform, including its containerized applications work together seamlessly. With these AWS services working in concert, Nium’s platform can operate with minimal downtime or service disruptions.

Nium also used Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, a fully managed in-memory cache service, to store, manage, and scale all reference data in a single, unified location. With this, the company could enhance data retrieval speed and overall system performance by caching frequently accessed information in memory, including holiday calendars, and payment mode data specific to each market the company operated in. To efficiently model and query this reference data, the fintech firm also deployed Amazon Neptune, a fully managed database service with a graph model. This approach led to faster data retrieval and payment transactions, which was crucial for providing a seamless customer experience.

On the security front, the company employed AWS CloudHSM (Hardware Security Module), a cloud-based service. With this, Nium could generate, store, and manage cryptographic keys in a secure and tamper-resistant environment, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of cryptographic key material. In addition, the company combined AWS CloudHSM with AWS Direct Connect to establish direct and secure connections with clearing systems in Singapore and the Single Euro Payments Area. This streamlined and improved the efficiency of cross-border transactions across its platform.

Nium also used Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL), a fully managed relational database service, to store and manage transactional data, user details, and other critical information. To efficiently execute code without provisioning or managing servers, the company implemented AWS Lambda, a serverless computing service. With this, Nium's operations and technical support staff are freed up to focus on higher-level tasks, such as innovating new services that drive business excellence.

Looking ahead, the company is committed to expanding its reach into burgeoning digital markets in Latin America, Africa, and specific regions of the Middle East. However, this strategic move is not without its unique set of challenges, including market-specific requirements to language translation complexities. 

In anticipation of these challenges, Nium began implementing a data lake in 2022 using Amazon Redshift, a cloud-based data warehousing service. With this, the fintech firm aims to create a robust data pipeline that includes data processing capabilities. In the long run, the company hopes to harness generate business insights and make informed, data-based decisions to enhance its services and offerings.

While data is still being onboarded as of November 2023, Nium plans to use the data lake to  pave the way for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-driven predictions. These capabilities will lay the foundation for robust data analytics, unlocking greater opportunities.

Ramana Satyavarapu, chief technology officer at Nium, noted: "The depth and breadth of AWS services have helped Nium build a robust platform that’s highly scalable, resilient, and fast. Its flexibility and ease of integration with clearing systems in various markets allow us to fast-track our expansion plans. We can now call Nium a truly global cross-border payments platform thanks to AWS."