In this AWS re:Invent 2023 keynote video, Cat Swetel, senior director of engineering at Nubank, shares how the fourth-largest financial institution in Brazil grew rapidly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), from a small startup to a company with over 90 million customers in under 10 years. Nubank was born in AWS, building an infrastructure using more than 40 AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and more to support more than 1,000 microservices across its infrastructure.
When the Brazilian Central Bank proposed a major change in how people transfer money, Nubank was positioned to quickly support the new ‘Pix’ protocol, developing a transfer flow to meet the 10 second latency requirement from scratch in under 5 months.
In around a year, Pix transactions rapidly increased and had exceeded its total debit and credit transactions. This unprecedented scale placed Nubank’s entire technical environment under stress, increasing load and causing instability across its mobile app and customer facing services.
Using AWS, Nubank’s Pix team spearheaded a multi-team effort to address urgent challenges and maximize architecture stability, without having to trade off cost efficiencies. Nubank reduced long garbage collector pauses and invested in nonvolatile memory express (NVME) disks to improve database caching strategies that increased load capacity while reducing overall latency, enabling the company to save $3,500 across its microservice flows for every one dollar invested in NVMe’s. With the help of AWS, Nubank decreased overall latency by 92% and while maintaining a 35% efficiency ratio, saved its customers over $8 billion in fees.
We were born in AWS, helping us to achieve rapid growth in just 10 years which is fueled by our low-cost operating platform and now our efficiency. With AWS, we are disrupting the market and making banking more accessible for customers who never had access before."
Cat Swetel
Senior Director of Engineering, Nubank
About Nubank
Nubank, one of the most prominent financial unicorns in Latin America, based in Brazil, crossed the 10 million-customer landmark by fostering a culture of microservices, scalability and flexibility, achieving high levels of customer satisfaction and admiration. By using AWS, Nubank developed their processing platform in only seven months and keeps innovation not only their application, but also the way they use AWS services.
Customer Speaker: Cat Swetel
Cat Swetel is Senior Director of Engineering at Nubank where she leads the group responsible for transactional infrastructure, from CICD to the runtime environments to the mobile application platform. Cat is deeply interested in exploring how the digital transformation of society could create the conditions for more generative and equitable institutions. She holds a bachelor's degree in Global Business Financial Management and a master's degree in Science and Technology Policy, both from Arizona State University.
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