Cloud-based payments platform
The client is a large public sector organisation that provides vital services to millions of people. It operates across a wide range of areas and is committed to modernising its operations through digital transformation, with a strong focus on security, efficiency and improving the experience for its users.
The organisation faced a significant challenge in managing payments across its many departments and agencies. Existing processes were fragmented and relied heavily on manual steps, which made them slow, costly and vulnerable to errors and fraud. Without change, these issues would have continued to cause delays, increase administrative overheads and reduce transparency, ultimately impacting service delivery and undermining its digital ambitions.
How we leveraged AWS for the client
To address this, Scott Logic designed and delivered a cloud-based payments platform capable of handling very high transaction volumes. The solution was built using an event-driven architecture and microservices, ensuring resilience and scalability. We developed APIs to meet open banking standards, enabling secure and rapid payment exchanges while reducing fraud risk.
We built the platform on AWS to deliver a secure, resilient and highly scalable solution. It uses Amazon CloudFront to keep the service globally available and responsive, while Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers ensure traffic is managed efficiently across multiple Availability Zones. Compute is provided by Amazon EKS (Fargate) for containerised microservices, supported by Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda for flexible and event-driven workloads.
Data and messaging are handled through Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) for reliable database operations, Amazon EFS for shared state storage, and Apache Kafka for high-throughput event streaming. Security and compliance are strengthened with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and AWS Secrets Manager, while Amazon S3 stores logs and compliance data. Operational visibility comes from AWS CloudWatch, and Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS provide robust messaging and queuing.
We designed the architecture to scale seamlessly, with autoscaling built into CloudFront, load balancers, EKS pods and ECS services, ensuring consistent performance even during traffic spikes. Combined with multi-AZ resilience and automated backups, the platform delivers high availability, strong security and the flexibility to grow with demand.
The system supports multiple payment methods and complies with international standards for financial data and IT service management. We delivered the platform following an agile approach with a strong emphasis on user-centred design, and ensured that security was independently validated. We provided a multidisciplinary team and ensured knowledge transfer to the client for long-term sustainability.
The outcomes
Within 18 months of private beta, the platform processed millions in payments for its first beta partner and is expected to handle tens of millions of transactions annually. It has significantly reduced processing time and operational effort, improved fraud prevention and made onboarding faster for new departments. By leveraging AWS cloud services, the organisation has achieved scalability, resilience and compliance, delivering measurable cost savings and operational efficiencies.