Open Banking Provider Yapily Powers Growth with AWS

Open banking is a revolution in financial services. It allows consumers and businesses to share their financial data safely and securely with third parties, paving the way for fresh financial products and services.  For the open banking system to work smoothly, an intermediary is needed to access financial data between third-party service providers and banks—and that’s where Yapily comes in. 

Yapily is crucial infrastructure in the open banking landscape, bridging the gap between banks and third parties. Its clients—including Intuit QuickBooks, IRIS, and Vivid—use Yapily’s open banking infrastucture to quickly and easily retrieve financial data and initiate payments.

Founded in 2017, Yapily has rapidly become one of Europe’s leading FinTech startups, securing funding from Tier 1 venture capital firms like Sapphire, Lakestar, and LocalGlobe. Yapily has industry-wide coverage, offering support for 99 percent of UK bank accounts and 85 percent of accounts in many major European countries. In total, Yapily connects to more than 1,500 banks across eight countries—and that list is growing every week.  

As a young company with huge potential, Yapily needed to grow—and fast. So it turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver the machine learning capabilities and analytical features it needed to scale. “We always knew AWS was a world leader in cloud infrastructure,” says Joao Martins, Yapily CTO, “but we we were really impressed by the support and collaboration. They have helped us at every step, giving us valuable strategic and technical advice.”

Because many of Yapily’s own clients already used AWS, it made sense for Yapily to move in the same direction. “We want to make life easy for our clients,” says Martins. “AWS offered many benefits, making the transition easier for our clients. AWS is a name they know and trust.” Martins says the business support and go-to-market advantages that AWS provides will help Yapily drive its 18-month growth plan, including expansion into new markets in Europe.

Developing machine learning capabilities was a priority for Yapily. The company is using Amazon SageMaker to drive innovation and enhance its financial products and services. Specifically, Yapily is using Amazon SageMaker to build machine learning models that categorize transaction data and derive actionable insights and intelligence for Yapily’s clients. “At Yapily, we’re using SageMaker data science products to serve our clients with rich insights and decision-ready analytics,” says Dongwhi Kim, Yapily’s product manager.

The company is making full use of Amazon SageMaker’s training and real-time services, using Yapily’s in-house models together with pre-built AWS models, particularly the DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm. As a result, model building and machine learning hyperparameter training has become highly cost-effective. The deployments are easy to manage, scale, and automate through deployment pipelines.

Using the Amazon API Gateway, Yapily can update its models with minimal intervention from the wider business, resulting in the rapid development of its data science services. Yapily has also added new microservices to boost operational efficiency and make it easier to manage changes to its codebase.

Since migrating to AWS, Yapily is now more scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective. This was all made possible by the AWS Well-Architected program. Like any startup, Yapily was looking for support along the way. AWS gave Yapily the guidance and advice it needed at every step, from solution architects and account managers to the AWS FinTech team.

Using serverless architecture and Kubernetes capabilities with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon Aurora database services, Yapily has elevated its machine learning capabilities and boosted its agility, helping it to onboard new clients in new regions.

“We’ve increased our product release cycles from 1 hour to less than 5 seconds,” says Martins. “This means we can push updates out to market faster and ultimately give our clients a better service.” 

Yapily has since entered several new markets, including Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. “AWS has helped us adopt better technologies and processes—like machine learning with SageMaker—that are helping us grow as a business,” says Martins.