Setu Supports 10 Million Monthly Digital Payments Securely on AWS

Setu, a fintech startup, provides plug-and-play APIs to help businesses reimagine onboarding, payments, deposits, lending, and data empowerment for its end customers. Setu facilitates utility payments at scale with India's Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), an integrated online platform for bill payments. Over 1,000 banks and organizations trust Setu's Biller Operating Unit (BOU) solution. As an entry point into the BBPS, BOU facilitates online payments from customers through a variety of payment apps and channels. The solution serves as a bridge between BOU banks and businesses, streamlining integration and simplifying compliance.

Scalability is a key requirement for Setu, as the organization's BOU solution actively processes more than 4,000 crore rupees (USD 480 million) monthly. Pete Jaison, head of growth at Setu by Pine Labs, states, "The BBPS ecosystem comprises of more than 20,000 entities responsible for recurring bills and 450 customer-facing apps offering bill payment services." He adds, "To effectively manage these entities and the growing payment volumes, we require a robust infrastructure provider."

Compliance is another critical requirement for Setu, alongside the ability to differentiate itself as a startup through rapid introduction of new features and functionality for its customers.

Setu chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in conjunction with AWS Auto Scaling to ensure seamless scalability for its BOU solution.

In addition to relying on AWS for scalability, Setu uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity on the cloud—along with Terraform and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) model to deploy new features to test within minutes of development.

AWS’s adherence to ISO 27001 and SOC2 standards and certifications supports Setu in meeting its regulatory compliance requirements. The business uses AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations for ISO270001 and SOC 2. Furthermore, the company adopted AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), an encryption and key management service scaled for the cloud, and AWS Shield Advanced for higher-level protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

To reduce costs by getting the best price performance for workloads running on Amazon EC2, Setu transitioned its database and Amazon OpenSearch Service logging cluster to Amazon Graviton Processor. Furthermore, the company implemented Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to capitalize on cost savings from unused Amazon EC2 capacity, resulting in a 35 percent reduction in operational expenses.