Key outcomes
By modernizing its payments platform on AWS, this global beauty retailer achieved:
58% lower “Ever 30” default rate driven by data-led credit scoring.
~78% projected reduction in event-processing costs via Amazon EventBridge.
10% productivity increase for heavy users utilizing the friction-free platform.
99.99% sustained availability while supporting billion-dollar TPV growth.
Secured SCD license, attaining regulated financial institution status.
Overview
One of Latin America's largest beauty companies relies on a network of more than a million independent consultants to bring its products to customers every day. For these consultants, access to reliable payments and credit is essential to managing cash flow, placing orders and growing their businesses.
However, the company's existing payment platform struggled to keep pace. Fragmented processes and brittle legacy systems created friction that slowed transactions and limited growth.
To change that, the company partnered with Thoughtworks. Together, they modernized the company's financial infrastructure on AWS, evolving the payments platform into a regulated financial institution capable of delivering embedded financial services at scale.
The opportunity: Overcoming structural barriers to growth
To expand its financial services capabilities, the company needed to overcome several challenges tied to its legacy infrastructure:
Architectural debt: A lack of ownership over legacy event libraries created maintenance bottlenecks.
Operational latency: A heavy reliance on slow-clearing payment methods, like bank slips, delayed payments and blocked consultant orders during high-demand cycles.
Risk exposure: Traditional instruments carried a 6.1% default rate, threatening cash flow and stability.
Addressing these challenges required more than incremental improvements. The company needed a strategic roadmap to modernize its financial core, creating a platform capable of supporting current demands and future services at global scale.
Innovation: A unified, event-driven fintech engine
To bring this vision to life, Thoughtworks and the company collaborated to modernize the existing financial platform on AWS.
The solution combined a serverless-first, event-driven architecture with real-time processing capabilities, creating a more resilient foundation for transaction processing, credit decisions and future growth.
By leveraging Thoughtworks’ Funding Acceleration Model (FAM), the team accelerated the migration from legacy systems to a modern, decoupled architecture. Key components included:
Amazon EventBridge: Replaced custom event-stream libraries with a standardized event backbone, centralizing event traffic and reducing maintenance complexity.
AWS AppConfig: Decoupled configuration from code, enabling gradual feature rollouts and automatic rollbacks based on real-time performance.
AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate: Powered real-time payment validation and credit scoring, scaling automatically to support transaction growth.
Amazon Kinesis: Streamed billions of transaction events for real-time fraud detection and management reporting.
This transformation was about more than modernizing systems; it was about redefining how financial services are delivered at scale. By adopting an event-driven architecture on AWS, we helped our client build a platform that is resilient, adaptive, and capable of extending financial access to over a million entrepreneurs in real time.
Impact: Reducing defaults and scaling growth
By shifting to a cloud-native, event-driven model, the client secured an SCD license from the Central Bank of Brazil. This Direct Credit Society approval made the client a regulated financial institution.
In addition, it delivered measurable and defensible business outcomes:
Reduced "Ever 30" defaults to 2.5%, outperforming the 6.1% benchmark for traditional retail credit.
Amazon EventBridge enabled the business to scale to billions of transactions without proportional cost growth.
The new architecture seamlessly supported a double-digit billion TPV expansion over a two-year period.
Reduced financial friction for heavy users, increasing average transaction values. |
Future: A global blueprint for AI-driven empowerment
With a foundation built on AWS and Thoughtworks’ engineering excellence, the global beauty retailer is positioned to scale its payment solution across all the markets it serves. The roadmap includes leveraging an Amazon S3 data lake to deploy agentic models and provide personalized financial coaching for every consultant in the network.
This is more than a technical modernization; it is a new standard for how global brands can use intelligent technology to financially empower millions.
