Our client is a Fortune 500 financial services organization specializing in payment technology and software solutions. They empower businesses across industries to process transactions securely and efficiently on a global scale.

Challenge: Modernize a costly, rigid mainframe to enable agility

The financial services organization faced high operating costs, limited agility, and an increasing reliance on specialized mainframe skills. Additionally, it struggled with data trapped in silos and complex legacy integrations. These challenges hindered innovation and made it difficult to connect with modern payment technologies and partners. To address these issues, the company decided to modernize its decades-old mainframe platform, which powered global card issuing and payment operations.

Solution: Leverage AWS to simplify, scale, and innovate

Partnering with Thoughtworks, the company embarked on a strategic modernization initiative to create a scalable, cloud-based issuer processing platform for financial institutions hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The transformation aimed to simplify operations, enhance resilience, and enable rapid innovation across the payments ecosystem. 

This cloud-based issuer processing platform, built on AWS, allows financial institutions of all sizes to seamlessly manage the entire lifecycle of card issuance, authorization, risk, fraud analysis, and management. The new platform delivers faster responsiveness to market demands, improved integration with partner systems, and increased transparency through advanced analytics. The modernization re-architected the legacy mainframe platform into a modern, cloud-native architecture on AWS, replacing the monolithic system with microservices designed for agility and scalability. 

The new platform leverages a range of AWS services to enhance performance, scalability, and resilience:

• Amazon RDS manages transactional data

• Amazon DynamoDB provides high performance storage

• Amazon MSK enables real-time data streaming

• AWS Lambda handles lightweight batch processing without the need for servers

• AWS EKS helps deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications

• Additional services like S3, Athena, and Glue were also utilized

   

The platform’s data models and workflows were also redesigned to reduce dependencies and enable faster, more efficient operations.

Previously, the legacy system relied heavily on vertical scaling to handle increased transaction volumes, which was both costly and rigid. With the new distributed architecture, the platform now supports horizontal scaling, enabling it to efficiently handle growing transaction volumes while maintaining high performance.

Outcome: A future-ready system driving continuous innovation

The modernization effort transformed the company’s payments ecosystem by unifying systems, automating verification processes, and introducing a secure, scalable DevOps foundation. This created a future-ready platform that supports continuous innovation, enhances operational efficiency, delivers seamless customer experiences, and adheres to SLAs even during heavy transaction loads.

By re-engineering the core payments foundation, the company has created a future-ready ecosystem that supports continuous innovation, data-driven insights, and long-term competitiveness. 

Today, the enterprise operates with greater agility, efficiency, and confidence—having transformed a legacy challenge into a modern, cloud-powered platform for growth.