RS2 Speeds Up Customer Onboarding for BankWORKS Payment Platform Using AWS

BankWORKS is one of the largest financial payment processing platforms in the world. Major financial institutions such as Barclays and Paysafe rely on it to handle all aspects of payments, including issuing debit cards, acquiring merchants, authorizing transactions, managing PIN services, and handling disputes and fraud.

Until recently, though, BankWORKS’ growth was constrained by the platform’s legacy IT infrastructure, which included an on-premises data center, and applications and services running on six different cloud providers. RS2, the payment technology company that created BankWORKS, wanted to expand its customer base. And to do that, it needed a simpler setup that supported speedy customer onboarding and product innovation.

RS2 decided to consolidate the BankWORKS infrastructure and migrate more than 700 servers and over 450 TB of data to AWS. “We used to maintain direct relationships with several different vendors,” says Tonio Galea, head of infrastructure and IT operations at RS2. “By moving everything onto AWS and using its services, we only have one supplier to manage. This saves us so much effort. Our IT team now has time to work on developing new capabilities for our platform."

Because its infrastructure was so complex, RS2 reached out to AWS to assist with the BankWORKS migration. This resulted in RS2 using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), an outcome-driven methodology from AWS based upon its experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud.

The shift to AWS using MAP proved easy, fast, and cost-effective. “We had regular meetings with AWS experts and received training materials and documentation that helped us to avoid common pitfalls,” says Galea. “The credits AWS provided also reduced our costs.”

In addition, using MAP helps RS2’s existing developers understand and effectively adopt AWS technologies. When the company hires new staff, the MAP training materials also assist with getting the employees up to speed. “Our new employees can now quickly grasp our infrastructure and understand the possibilities offered on AWS,” says Galea.

Since migrating to AWS, BankWORKS can scale up resources quickly when customer demand rises. Provisioning new resources on AWS is simple—it requires just a few clicks.

Previously, when the business needed to increase resources because it had signed new customers or existing customers increased usage, it had to purchase and configure new hardware—which resulted in customer onboarding taking up to a year. Using AWS, it has shortened customer onboarding times to 1 month.

The platform performs faster on AWS too. Customers can connect to the BankWORKS platform and execute transactions in milliseconds, regardless of their geographic location. Previously, customers could experience latency issues because transactions were routed through BankWORKS’ main data center.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company was able to quickly shift to remote working. Even though its migration to AWS was not complete when the pandemic began, BankWORKS rolled out Amazon WorkSpaces—which provides secure, reliable, and scalable access to persistent desktops from any location—to its workforce within days. “Employees working in any part of the world were able to get instant access to their desktops, so everyone could remain productive while working from home,” says Galea.

The BankWORKS IT team now spends less time managing infrastructure, and can instead work on adding new capabilities to its platform. It can also efficiently roll out these updates and fixes to customers. “We now have more time to improve our products and can release more frequent updates—that’s a major advantage of using AWS,” says Galea.

The team is always looking for ways to use AWS to add functionality to its existing products, and to create innovative new products. Future plans include using Amazon ElastiCache to improve the speed of transactions processed on the platform and migrating an Oracle database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “We’re always aiming to grow our business and increase the performance and capacity of our infrastructure,” says Galea. “Using AWS, we can find suitable and efficient solutions for bringing our ideas to life—and to our customers.”