Ayoconnect: Leveraging IoT to Deliver API-Powered Financial Products

Ayoconnect is a SaaS company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Southeast Asia. The company builds an open finance platform for developers to select from a range of financial products and deliver them to their customers. By making direct debit, bill payment, subscription management, and data verification services available via APIs, Ayoconnect aims to build an infrastructure that enables clients to monetize and expand their businesses quickly and efficiently through open finance. The business employs 270 people spread across six countries and has grown from two clients in 2019 to 130 to date, including several big technology companies and banks.

Ayoconnect, a SaaS company based in Southeast Asia, aimed to provide an open finance platform for developers to deliver a range of financial products to their customers. However, the company faced challenges in launching the platform on a cloud environment due to regulations requiring Indonesians' financial and transactional data to stay within the country. The domestic cloud service provider they initially used could not fully meet Ayoconnect's requirements, leading to performance and stability issues. Furthermore, the company needed to transition from a business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business model, which required standardization and visibility to solve issues created by multiple infrastructure types and API formats across financial services.

With the launch of Google Cloud in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2020, Ayoconnect was able to comply with the country's data sovereignty requirements while leveraging Google Cloud's products, services, infrastructure, and expertise. The company adopted a Google Cloud architecture centered on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Cloud SQL, with Bitbucket pipelines used to automate the deployment of code and security scripts. Identity and Access Management enabled Ayoconnect to provide its teams with role-based access to data and systems, ensuring its security systems and processes met the requirements of enterprises operating in highly regulated industries. Ayoconnect also partnered with technology consulting firm Searce to deploy the Apigee API management platform, which now authenticates Ayoconnect clients to access the business's API products.

• The transition to Google Cloud enabled Ayoconnect to automate processes to scale its cloud infrastructure in line with demand, eliminating the need for manual requests that could take up to six hours to process. This allowed the business to respond quickly to changing circumstances, such as client promotions generating higher than forecasted transactions and user numbers. The company can now seamlessly scale to support client promotional campaigns and other activities that generate high traffic. Furthermore, Ayoconnect has successfully executed its transition from a business-to-consumer to a fast-growing business-to-business provider, delivering the stability and availability required by enterprise-grade customers in highly regulated industries.

• Kept infrastructure team headcount at three versus 10 to 12, reducing costs

• Achieved uptime of 99.8% to support near always-available requirement for financial services SLAs

• Enabled automated scalability in minutes to support campaigns and events that stimulate traffic