Google Cloud Platform > Case Studies > Auka: Scaling Mobile Payments Safely and Reliably with Google Cloud

Auka: Scaling Mobile Payments Safely and Reliably with Google Cloud

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Cement
Telecommunications

Use Cases

Construction Management
Infrastructure Inspection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

About The Customer

Auka is a fintech company based in Norway that provides white-label technology to banks on a SaaS model. The company connects banks, consumers, and merchants, enabling a new generation of commerce and financial services. Auka was recognized as the fastest growing fintech by Deloitte on their annual Technology Fast 500 EMEA list. The platform is currently being used by 17 banks, tens of thousands of merchants, and millions of consumers. Auka was the first to run payments entirely in the cloud in Norway under its previous brand name mCash. After selling the mCASH brand to Norway’s second largest financial institution, SpareBank 1, the company relaunched as Auka.

The Challenge

Auka, a Norway-based fintech company, provides white-label technology to banks on a SaaS model. The company connects banks, consumers, and merchants, enabling a new generation of commerce and financial services. However, Auka faced the challenge of building a safe, reliable payments platform that could also scale at great speed. The company's home market, Norway, had over 2 billion card transactions in 2016 alone, the highest per-capita rate in the world. The mobile wallet adoption rate in the Nordic region was even more impressive, reaching 65% in 2016. This paved the way for mobile payments to replace cash and cards in a few years. Auka needed a solution that could handle this extreme scaling, from ten to thousands of transactions a second, while also complying with international financial regulations.

The Solution

Auka turned to Google Cloud for a solution. Google Cloud's App Engine provides the backbone of Auka’s infrastructure, allowing the company to delegate the challenge of scaling the server-side infrastructure. This enabled Auka to focus its resources on building the best possible platform for its partners. Auka also used BigQuery for reporting and data analytics, enabling the company to process massive amounts of data in seconds. This optimized everything from merchant reporting to user behaviour analysis within the apps. Auka’s staff could easily build dashboards and run analyses with Looker Studio and Cloud Datalab, keeping track of growth and identifying areas of improvement. Meanwhile, Apigee API Platform and Cloud Endpoints helped Auka open up its APIs, enabling customers to further tailor Auka’s services to their needs.

Operational Impact

With Google Cloud, Auka built a powerful, resilient financial services platform that can accommodate the ever-growing volume of mobile transactions not just in Norway but throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In the summer of 2017, Auka won the award for best mobile payments platform in Europe at the CFI Magazine Technology Awards, vindicating its decision to base itself 100% in the cloud. Auka continues to improve and evolve its platform, experimenting with Google’s suite of machine learning tools for predictions and automations as well as Cloud Spanner for globally consistent scalable storage of relational data. Auka is already looking beyond Europe, helping and advising banks worldwide to take advantage of this technology to grow their position in the market.

Quantitative Benefit

Handles extreme scaling, from ten to thousands of transactions a second with App Engine
Processes massive amounts of data in seconds with BigQuery
Enables customers to tailor Auka’s services to their needs with Apigee API Platform and Cloud Endpoints