Based in Italy, the Satispay payment network enables its customers to securely send money using a smartphone app. The service relies on International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), so it is not linked to any specific bank or to credit or debit cards. The company is lowering the high commissions typical of the electronic payment sector—charging only for transfers of more than €10 (US$11), at €0.20 ($0.22) per transaction. This means it is usable for everyday payments: from transfers between friends to buying a drink at a café.
Satispay’s monolithic infrastructure and data center weren’t flexible enough for the team to develop new products or features and so any updates and releases had to be requested from the company’s hosting partner one day in advance. Moreover, none of the technical processes could be handled directly by the Satispay team. The company therefore needed a scalable infrastructure that could support its rapidly growing operations, but it was essential that moving to a new platform wouldn’t compromise business continuity. The payments company also operates in a sensitive industry: it had to ensure regulatory compliance which would enable expansion into new markets with different legislation requirements.
Satispay was looking for a cloud provider that could give it greater flexibility at lower cost. It chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) and worked with AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner beSharp to move to the AWS Cloud. Dario Brignone, cofounder of Satispay, says, “I knew AWS from a previous role and was sure that the broad range of features would give us the flexibility we needed.”
Satispay worked with beSharp to redesign its application from a monolithic architecture to a stateless architecture based on microservices to enable easier horizontal scaling. It uses services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS CodeDeploy, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to foster a continuous delivery method in an environment that scales as required, without wasting money or resources. Satispay also took advantage of the Business Support plan from AWS, which helped the company in its cloud-migration journey. “I love using AWS Support,” says Brignone. “We ask some technically complex questions, and we always get precise answers from the team.”
A new modular infrastructure allowed Satispay to easily scale its services from 3,000 users to more than 200,000, representing 6,500 percent growth in just under two years. It also now works with 20,000 merchants.
Deployment times have also increased. “Using AWS, we’ve improved our deployment speed from one release per week to more than 50 releases per week,” says Brignone. “It’s a freedom we love.” Previously, Satispay had to give one day’s notice to its infrastructure host before making updates. But on AWS it can update seven or eight times a day.
Its compliance challenge has also been addressed: beSharp has helped Satispay demonstrate that the AWS Cloud is secure enough to meet legislation in new markets, including the requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom, where Satispay is looking to expand.
Satispay has gained more autonomy across the business and can now make better-informed decisions about product development and growth strategy. “I only spend one or two hours a day looking after our production environment on AWS,” says Brignone. “The rest of the time I can dedicate to developing new features for customers, helping streamline our agile processes or writing code.” That means the move to the cloud happened with no disruption. beSharp offered Satispay 24/7 support—from testing to migration—which proved to be invaluable in ensuring a migration of Satispay’s entire infrastructure with only 15 minutes of downtime. Simone Merlini, chief executive officer of beSharp says, “AWS let us set up dummy production environments so we could carry out several simulations of the switch-off. That let us fine-tune our approach and gave us confidence for the actual migration.”
An Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN). beSharp enables all the processes that make a company run as smoothly as possible on the cloud, from migration to implementation.
For more information about how beSharp can help your company build and manage your AWS environment, see beSharp’s listing in the AWS Partner Directory.
Learn more about financial services workloads on AWS.