Travelex Reduces Integration Costs by 70% Using AWS

Founded in 1976, Travelex aims to simplify access to international money for its customers through various delivery options. Travelex’s international footprint and mix of services and products help it support the varying travel money needs of its customers across 80 countries with a retail presence in over 20 countries. It has a vast network that includes circa 600 physical stores and 800 ATMs in some of the world’s top international airports.

To integrate multiple systems and interfaces across its technology landscape, Travelex had relied on a combination of third-party ETL solutions, licensed enterprise products, and in-house legacy software. These monolithic applications were responsible for processing data and feeding it to downstream systems. But the middleware setup proved inflexible, costly to operate, and difficult to scale. Maintaining it required a dedicated team of eight people working around the clock and created dependencies between systems and teams, so that changes to one system would affect others. Moreover, the third-party vendor responsible for maintaining the complex system of over 100 servers and point-to-point ETLs did not provide the support that Travelex was looking for.

Therefore, Travelex decided to modernize its middleware, the first cloud-based initiative in a larger digital transformation for the company. The priorities were to align Travelex’s middleware with its business processes and use more modern tools such as APIs and event-based integrations. “We wanted to build a decoupled layer so that we could be more agile and flexible in our digital transformation,” says Hans van der Waal, global IT director at Travelex.

Travelex selected AWS serverless, event-driven solutions because they are scalable, provide a flexible pay-per-use model, and have built-in security. Within one year, Travelex launched its integration solution on AWS, migrating 250 workloads—consolidated from 350.

To build its modern solution, Enterprise Integration Framework (EIF), Travelex used Integration on AWS—a broad suite of purpose-built application, file, and data integration services provided by AWS. EIF connects Travelex’s source applications, such as point-of-sale systems for its physical locations, to its destination applications—including Travelex compliance, fraud, finance, and marketing systems and partner software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

To modify one application without affecting others, Travelex followed a business domain-driven approach and used a microservices architecture and event-driven integrations to build, deploy, and scale its applications independently. Using AWS, the company was able to build event-driven architectures to power communication between microservices. “Using Integration
on AWS, we have a solution that is agile to the core, which wasn’t possible with our previously tightly coupled solution,” says Hans van der Waal. Also, Travelex can securely and natively connect to multiple systems and use over 250 purpose-built integrations with in-house and third-party SaaS or platform-as-a-service applications.

Travelex developed reusable adapters to connect business applications, promoting modularity. It replaced batch file-based integrations with API-based integrations using Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at nearly any scale. This change improved data flow and responsiveness. The company also optimized compute cost and performance by using AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service. Travelex transitioned from SQL to NoSQL data transformations using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB—a serverless, NoSQL database service—significantly improving performance and scalability.

To optimize resource allocation and performance, the company plans to use dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch—a service to observe and monitor resources and applications—alongside AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)—fully managed message queuing.

Travelex uses infrastructure as code and has fully automated continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that deploy updates daily with virtually no downtime. Travelex validated that its architecture followed best practices by conducting an AWS Well-Architected review. “AWS provided us with technical resources and support, so we were able to achieve a robust design, validate our implementation, and continue to optimize our middleware solution,” says Vina Nembhani, vice president, business solutions engineering at Travelex.

Using Integration on AWS, Travelex can combine event-and API-driven approaches for its workloads. Travelex developed 10–15 near real-time APIs using Integration on AWS and connected these using Amazon API Gateway. Using EIF, Travelex handles about 70,000 API requests per day per API.

Travelex cut its middleware costs by 70 percent using Integration on AWS and saved third-party license fees of 395,000 pounds sterling per year. It also lowered infrastructure overhead by 40 percent by using automation and managed services from AWS and lowered its cost to roll out new business capabilities by 20 percent. Taking advantage of AWS pricing that scales with its business, Travelex is charged for only what it uses. The company also streamlined business
processes and cut operational costs by 90 percent.