Openpay’s Data Platform on AWS Fuels International Expansion and Innovation

“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) is becoming the preferred payment option for online shoppers. BNPL plans, also known as point-of-sale loans, allow shoppers to pay for their items over a period of instalments. By 2028, the global market for BNPL is expected to reach $20.4 billion, with BNPL plans appearing more cost effective and simpler for consumers to obtain than lines of credit or traditional credit cards.

Openpay Group Ltd. is a fast-growing player in the global BNPL payment solutions market. The company’s robust platform enables it to deliver flexible plans in the market with loan durations of 2–24 months and loan amounts of up to $20,000.

The fintech focuses on providing a range of payment solutions in industries such automotive, healthcare, home improvement, and education. It developed a next-generation BNPL solution called "buy now, pay smarter” (BNPS) that provides consumers with transparency and control. Openpay provides services to payment processors, merchants, and consumers in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where it operates under the brand name Opy. 

Openpay is running its entire technology stack on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—from secure application integration with merchants and facilitating and processing loan requests right down to informing applicants if their loan requests were successful. “Essentially, everything we do in the backend is powered on AWS,” says Baher Maher, data engineering team lead at Openpay.

With a strong cloud foundation already in place, Openpay increased its focus on data analytics in August 2020. At the time, the team was extracting information from as many as 13 separate systems to share reports across global teams. In the same period, the business was experiencing significant growth and planning for an expansion to the US. But the data extraction process was an inefficient way of working and would not be scalable as they grew.

Openpay sought to create a single analytics platform to gain a consolidated view across its operations for faster global reporting. It turned to its AWS account team for assistance and, after several workshops, created a design for a Global Data Platform.

With the support of its AWS account team, Openpay started its greenfield implementation of the Global Data Platform in October 2020. And in just four months, the platform went live in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

The business created a data lake for the platform on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for raw data capacity. Next, the data lake was deployed across multiple AWS Regions to ensure compliance with local data protection laws. Following this, Openpay built a data warehouse using Amazon Redshift to store data lake information in structured formats for analysis.

Openpay leveraged AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), an out-of-the box tool to migrate its CRM system. Maher explains, “Through discussions with our AWS account team, we could easily understand how to build our Global Data Platform efficiently without compromising quality or performance.”

With the Global Data Platform now live, data analysts at Openpay run queries in the data warehouse in less than 30 seconds. Maher says, “It takes us just 20 seconds to run queries using Amazon Redshift—and that’s without any optimisation, whereas previously, it took us 30 minutes for the same query.”

Furthermore, data analysts no longer work into the evenings extracting data from multiple systems. “By transitioning to Amazon Redshift, reports are carried out in a much more reasonable timeframe. Analysts don’t have to work overtime to run reports, so they feel more productive and efficient during their workdays,” says Maher.

In addition to faster queries, Openpay gains a better understanding of how its customers behave globally and in each specific region. Data analysts can build reports based on specific countries or demographics in 30 minutes instead of several hours, assured that the data is accurate and up to date.

“Our Client Experience teams can see how customers are using our products and where there might be pain points. We can now identify areas of improvement and ways to enhance our overall customer experience,” says Maher.

Creating reports on an as-needed basis has also helped the company drive expansion. To launch its BNPS services in the US in October 2021, Openpay had to overcome the complexity of different regulatory requirements in every state.

With the Global Data platform on AWS, the company could provide the required reports to financial regulators in a timely manner, which aided the fintech in securing the licenses needed to operate. “It was extremely helpful to have all our data in one place, which allowed our finance team to iterate quickly and get information back to regulators whenever requests came in,” says Maher.

In the future, Openpay plans to make better sense of the company’s data with Amazon SageMaker and its data lake on Amazon S3 to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. By leveraging insights from the models, the company is looking to improve its marketing and product development. It is currently exploring ways of using ML to automate campaigns so that targeted online advertisements are launched when their respective customer groups are browsing the web.

Maher concludes, “Creating a modern Global Data Platform that meets the regulatory requirements of international operations while offering the necessary flexibility to drive key business decisions and allow for innovation is a fine balancing act. Using AWS, Openpay has been able to establish our core data and analytics capability for our global team of data analysts and scientists with a platform that is both flexible and scalable.”

 To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/financial-services.