How AWS is helping fintech company MatchMove build a scalable platform to move digital cash securely

Over the last few years, traditional financial services in India have undergone a radical transformation, aided by technology and innovation. According to a report by NASSCOM, the Indian FinTech software market is expected to double from its current $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion in 2020, with e-commerce, smartphone penetration and customer expectation as the driving forces.

MatchMove, one of the fastest-growing FinTech firms in digital payments and next-generation banking domain, has been riding on this wave of growth. Based out of Singapore, MatchMove has enabled B2B businesses and their customers to spend easily and securely on both offline and online channels through instantly-issued prepaid cards that are compatible with all major card networks.

The company provides a scalable, business-friendly platform-as-a-service with intelligent tools and data – enabling clients to create amazing products that address the challenges of moving digital money securely. For instance, one of its flagship products, MatchMove Lightspeed, is a powerful, out-of-the-box solution, enables businesses to launch their own branded payments platform within minutes.

“MatchMove is exclusively positioned with our Banking as a Service platform. There’s no infrastructure to buy, set up or manage — you just log in and select the features you want or access our SDK or APIs for even deeper integration,” explains Krishnan Sarangapani, CTO, MatchMove.

Overcoming challenges in the ecosystem

Despite a sizeable population of more than 600 million, many people in Southeast Asia, do not have a bank account or a credit card to keep pace with the changing times and trends. This observation led to the birth of MatchMove. Since its inception in 2009, the company grew rapidly, expanding from 25 employees in early 2016 to 150 employees by year end. It has constantly been innovating and brainstorming for ways to address the many challenges in the sector - from financial inclusion to compliance. Krishnan says the company is uniquely positioned to solve these challenges. “Today, we offer end-to-end business architecture – including key partnerships with regulators, card networks and financial institutions, along with all backend processing and regulatory compliance and reporting required to managing financial products. This essentially enables MatchMove’s clients to focus only on servicing their customers.”

Scaling new heights with AWS

MatchMove has built its solutions on AWS from the ground up, given the outstanding support and infrastructure reliability of AWS.

“AWS Services guarantees availability for critical applications, have very minimal downtime with very low RPO and RTO. In addition, AWS offers over 165 fully featured services globally across regions, and this helped MatchMove find all their requirements under one roof. Added benefits of being part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) provided the right push,” Sarangapani says.

The APN Partner Central at provides all APN Partners with the tools and content they need to grow their business on AWS. APN Partners can access AWS technical and non-technical training, request marketing and business support, download partner-focused content, and connect with other AWS partners around the world.

MatchMove leverages AWS for workloads like Kubernetes, ElK Stack, Rabbitmq, Elastic Cache, RDS, Sensu, Prometheus, Jenkins, ECR, Sophos UTM, Direct Connect, Cloudfront and Incognito. While Kubernetes and ELK Stack are deployed using IAAC using AWS Cloud formation Templates, Sensu and Prometheus are deployed using Ansible Playbooks;

Java, Go, Python Django, PHP code is maintained and versions in Bitbucket with clear branching strategy.

The deployment of these workloads was very seamless, and has zero downtime, Sarangapani says. They use various deployment strategies such as canary, blue-green to help them in the same. Building proper CI/CD Pipelines with proper health checks has helped MatchMove maintain the uptime of the applications.

In addition, the rapid innovation of AWS has helped MatchMove focus on their products. Krishnan explains, “Using managed services such as AWS Elasticsearch, Redshift, RDS etc. was also very easy in AWS, taking away the maintenance overhead.”

Growing upwards and onwards

AWS has also been continuously supporting MatchMove in finding an appropriate setup for various kinds of application requirements. AWS Solution Architects and Technical Account Managers assigned to them are always available to provide the necessary support for architecture or solutions to make our application requirement possible. AWS has also helped them offer better insights for a superior Omnichannel experience. “AWS has always been a single place where we have found all our requirements satisfied. We use AWS RDS for databases, Market Place images for various use cases such as Firewalls, UTMs, etc, Redshift for data warehousing, S3 for Storage”.

Being a FinTech company, MatchMove has business and regulatory requirements on a monthly basis. AWS has a wide variety of services available to help them fulfil many of these requirements. AWS’ solutions also allow MatchMove dynamic scaling options, both horizontally and vertically. In cloud, scaling according to incoming traffic is essential. In AWS, they can scale resources both vertically and horizontally with a few button clicks. The auto scaling service in AWS for EC2 instances has helped MatchMove in automatically scaling resources horizontally according to the increase in traffic. This has also helped in saving costs upto 20 percent by removing instances when there is low traffic.

Business benefits

AWS charges MatchMove only based on the resources used and this has helped the company in reducing the cost by time-scaling their resources. The services provided in AWS have always been elastic and the company pays for the resources it utilises. This on-demand scaling and pricing for the resources being used has helped to launch many products.

All major managed services such as RDS, Elastic Cache, Redshift in AWS have a feature called Maintenance Window, where companies can decide at what time the changes from AWS or the changes by the company are applied, so that changes don’t not get applied at peak times and affect live traffic.

AWS has also helped MatchMove acquire new customers, thanks to its uptime and efficiency, which in turn has minimised their downtimes and latency issues, making MatchMove’s platform and applications reliable.

“AWS provides various integrations for automation which has enabled us to develop tools to reduce time to onboard customers and time to market of our products such as MatchMove Lightspeed, that enables customers to launch their own branded payments platform within minutes,” Sarangapani says.

Newer avenues

Headquartered in Singapore, MatchMove also has offices in India, Philippines and Indonesia, with the Indian offices set up in Bengaluru, Visakhapatnam and Mumbai. MatchMove is focused on releasing advance products and features with key focus on Services, AI/ML and Automation. These features will improve customer experience, enhance accountability on Fraud and Regulatory Compliance around Limits, KYC management etc. AWS offers key services around these areas to seamlessly integrate as part of our architecture and solutions.

The pace of innovation of AWS provides a trusted partner in our journey to introduce new products and features to our customers, partners globally across different regions.