As an integral part of the Eurosystem, this bank is a national central bank of the Euro area and the European Central Bank. The organization consists of about 6,800 employees and uses technical and financial resources to offer quality services in an efficient, responsible, and impartial way. In June 2017, this bank decided to develop a fast, reliable, and cost-efficient solution to meet Eurosystem’s directive to offer instant payments as part of the TARGET instant payment settlement system (TIPS). The bank needed to provide customers with a way to make payments within seconds from any euro-area bank while maintaining privacy and security for some 43 million transactions a day.
About the company
Major Central Bank of Europe
Challenge
Private instant payments threaten to fragment Eurosystem
Digitalization was upending the banking system with instant payments from private services such as PayPal, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Alibaba quickly outpacing the banks in Europe. The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) had concerns that these private instant payment services would lead to fragmentation and division of the European retail payments market and currencies, serve only profitable regions or countries while neglecting others, and create privacy and security risks.
Existing solutions were too expensive, took too long, or did not provide the privacy required. For example, bank payments take up to one business day for a euro payment and multiple days for ACH payments. Systems like Visa cost 2-3% per transaction. Blockchain transactions take 10 minutes each and are part of public records, thus raising privacy concerns.
This central bank agreed to develop and manage an instant payment platform in cooperation with others in Europe.
Challenges included:
Real time transfer
The service needed to offer instant payments, lay the groundwork for person-to-person mobile payments, and more.
Regionally agnostic
Allow citizens and firms to make payments via banks anywhere in the eurozone within a matter of seconds (not regionally divisive).
Real time, uninterrupted performance
Handle 43 million transactions per day and be highly available at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.
Cost-effective
The bank needed to keep the cost of transactions low.
Reliability and consistency
The system could not tolerate data loss or data inconsistency.
Security
Keep customer information and transactions private and secure.
Instant, reliable Euro bank payments — anytime, anywhere
Guaranteed resilience with zero downtime
Deployed across two datacenters with synchronous replications, zero downtime, no need for failback synchronization.Strong performance and consistency
10,000 writes per second and end-to-end processing time under 10 seconds (under 1 second in light load conditions)Scalability
High transaction volumes and horizontal scaling to thousands of European banks, plus the ability to support other currencies in the future.Top-notch support
The bank and its customers were impressed by the reliable service, support, speed, and ease of use.Results
High performance, scalability, and expansion for future needs
After a fast and straightforward migration from community edition to enterprise edition, the bank was very pleased with the results of the Aerospike solution.
Per transaction cost of under 0.2 euro cents
24/7 high availability
10,000 writes per second with low latency
Cross data center replication
Scalability for over 1,000 European banks
Payment history and replay
Testimonials
...If there is the demand, other currencies can be supported as well. In fact, although TIPS is primarily devoted to settling euro-denominated instant payments, it has been designed as a multi-currency system.
Governor of the central bank
In hours I had my development environment
Technical officer, IT innovation and development department for the central bank