Serverless Architecture Powers MONEI’s Fast, Secure, and Scalable Digital Payment Solutions

MONEI is a global fintech startup that provides digital payment solutions for more than 300 e-commerce platforms around the world. It serves small merchants who are seeking a fast, user-friendly system that allows them to receive their money as quickly as possible, as well as larger customers who are processing a high volume of transactions and want to save money on commission fees.

Based in Spain, the company was founded in 2019 and recently won AWS’ Startup Architecture Challenge: Iberia, which comes with a prize of $25,000 in AWS credits. In its winning submission, MONEI’s CTO Dmitriy Nevzorov highlighted how building a 100% serverless architecture using AWS formed a central part of the company’s strategy, allowing it to focus on reliability and scalability and provide low-cost solutions to its customers.

“Using AWS’s out-of-the-box solutions, we were able to focus on our product and business logic rather than spending time reinventing the wheel,” Nevzorov says. “Thanks to AWS, we had time to deliver great user experience and quickly add new features for our customers.”

For MONEI, security comes first. AWS allowed the startup to create data flows that are fault-tolerant and able to recover from any possible failure. MONEI uses Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream and buffer its data, AWS Lambda with DLQs for business logic, Amazon DynamoDB as a primary database, AWS Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) to encrypt sensitive information, Amazon S3 to store historical changes, and Amazon ElasticSearch and Amazon Athena to handle analytics. Additionally, AWS security services — such as Security Hop, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Config — helped MONEI easily achieve PCI DSS compliance.

AWS also powers the company’s customer-facing platform. MONEI uses AWS AppSync to power its dashboard and real-time analytics, Amazon Cognito for authentication and access management, and AWS Amplify to host and deploy its front end.

“This kind of design allows us to keep our maintenance costs low, which means low commissions and very competitive pricing for our customers,” Nevzorov says.

Moving forward, too, AWS is helping MONEI deliver money to its customers even more quickly — a key concern for many clients. To achieve this, MONEI is developing a real-time risk score system based on machine learning that will detect fraudulent transactions and safely release money to customers within 24 hours. Using Amazon Fraud Detector “allows us to implement this feature quickly and at a very low cost,” Nevzorov says. “This will significantly differentiate us from our competitors.”

Building the startup’s architecture on AWS has poised MONEI to grow quickly and reliably, while serving the needs of all its customers, large and small. “We made sure from the very beginning that our serverless architecture is scalable and reliable,” Nevzorov says. “Thanks to that, our product can grow, our sales can increase, and our architecture will always be ready.”