Cloud-Native Modernization Helped BNPL Fintech Cut Storage Costs by 30% and Accelerate Feature Delivery

A leading UK-based fintech specializing in interest-free Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services partnered with Cygnet.One to refine its cloud infrastructure to better support its growing user base and evolving product roadmap. By redesigning key layers of its AWS environment, including database architecture, storage, observability, and disaster recovery, the company strengthened system availability, improved delivery velocity, and reduced infrastructure costs.

As consumer adoption of Buy Now Pay Later services continues to expand, fintech providers must maintain secure, high-performing platforms capable of handling increasing transaction volumes. This UK-based BNPL company serves over 1.5 million users and partners with 300+ retailers to deliver seamless checkout financing through platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. With a sharp focus on user experience, fraud prevention, and credit assessment, the company operates a robust platform that integrates machine learning and custom workflows to ensure reliability and trust.

Anticipating a surge in order volume and a projected £1 billion in GMV, the client proactively sought to enhance its infrastructure. The objective was to build an environment that supported rapid scaling, predictable costs, and secure, automated operations, while continuing to uphold the strong service standards its customers expected.

To enable this vision, the client collaborated with Cygnet.One to introduce architectural improvements across computer, storage, data, and observability. This included shifting to a container-based model with Amazon EKS, optimizing storage through automated tiering, decoupling analytics workloads, and enforcing strong security and governance frameworks. The initiative allowed the platform to scale efficiently, reduce infrastructure complexity, and support faster innovation without compromising performance or compliance.

The client already operated a successful digital lending platform and had steadily grown to accommodate a rising base of retailers and consumers. As product expansion and transaction volume increased, the team recognized the need to evolve their systems further to meet long-term goals for efficiency, cost control, and agility.

The previous architecture used EC2-hosted monolithic applications with limited auto-scaling and manual CI/CD. While these served the organization effectively in early phases, growth introduced new demands:

• MySQL databases lacked read replicas and multi-AZ support, leading to scaling challenges during peak loads.
• Static usage of Amazon S3 for storing logs, user documents, and integration outputs caused rising storage costs without tiered policies.
• Disaster recovery mechanisms were under-defined, increasing risk exposure in case of regional disruptions or data loss.
• Monitoring was decentralized and reactive, making root cause analysis and proactive tuning more time-consuming.
• Deployment cycles relied on manual coordination, slowing feature rollouts and complicating rollback or testing workflows.

To sustain business momentum and prepare for expansion, the client sought a future-ready environment that offered high availability, visibility, and automation, while keeping operational costs aligned with business performance.

Cygnet.One worked closely with the client to reimagine its AWS environment with a scalable, secure, and automated design. A comprehensive discovery and planning phase mapped existing workloads and identified areas where architectural changes could have lasting impact.

Application services were decomposed into containerized microservices and deployed on Amazon EKS, introducing agility and reducing provisioning overhead. This was complemented by an automated CI/CD pipeline using Bitbucket, AWS CodeBuild, and Terraform, enabling faster, more reliable deployments.

At the data layer, Amazon RDS for MySQL was configured in multi-AZ mode with read replicas to enhance availability and isolate workloads. Daily automated snapshots and point-in-time recovery capabilities were enabled, improving resilience and compliance. Cross-region replication ensured data durability and alignment with backup best practices.

For object storage, Amazon S3 was restructured to apply Intelligent-Tiering. This allowed infrequently accessed documents, logs, and artifacts to automatically transition to cost-efficient storage classes, helping reduce long-term storage costs by 30% without sacrificing access or compliance.

Observability was significantly improved through the integration of New Relic APM, Amazon CloudWatch, and OpenSearch. Teams now benefit from real-time dashboards, anomaly detection, and system-wide log analytics, allowing for faster response times and better insight into application behavior and performance trends.

The company’s analytics layer was also decoupled from transactional systems by introducing a data lake architecture using AWS Glue and Redshift. This improved query performance and supported richer business intelligence while reducing production load.

Security was a foundational focus across the new architecture. IAM policies were tightened around least privilege, and encryption at rest and in transit was enforced using AWS KMS and TLS. CloudTrail and AWS Config provided auditing and change tracking, helping the client maintain GDPR compliance and internal governance standards.

With these improvements in place, the client’s platform is now better equipped to deliver consistent experiences during peak periods, roll out new features with confidence, and support an expanding partner and user ecosystem without architectural bottlenecks.