PayPal puts data at the heart of its fraud strategy with Aerospike

“Prior to Aerospike, we were using another in-memory data store and we are running into challenges in terms of the cost of scaling. We needed to seamlessly leverage both the memory and disk in such a way that it can guarantee a consistent performance. We moved to Aerospike for its hybrid memory architecture to leverage next generation memory and SSDs to their fullest advantage.”

Sai Devabhaktuni, Sr. Director of Engineering, PayPal

“PayPal is innovating deep analytics to rapidly respond to emerging fraud patterns, then deploying into an event-driven, fast data, in-memory architecture to accelerate detection, reduce losses and achieve near-continuous availability.”

Mikhail Kourjanski PHD, Lead Data Architect, Risk and Compliance Management Platform, PayPal

About the Company

PayPal is the world's largest online payment system

PayPal is the world’s largest online money transfer, billing and payments system. It owns the PayPal, Venmo, iZettle, Xoom, Braintree, and Paydiant brands. By leveraging technology to make financial services and commerce more convenient, affordable, and secure, the PayPal platform is empowering more than 325 million consumers and merchants in more than 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.

Challenge

Scaling a fraud prevention solution with 32% annual data growth

PayPal’s fraud rate, while well below the industry average, still gives them over 1 billion dollars a year of expsosure. They need to process and analyze more data, faster while minimizing end-user friction. On the back-end, their fraud management platform merges data from customer enrollments, payments, invoicing preferences, and profile data.

Real-time decisioning

Needed to quickly process and analyze data to identify emerging fraud patterns in under 200 milliseconds.

Faster data processing

Requirement to grow from 3.5 transactions per second to 7 million transactions a second.

Scaling for large amounts of data

Data scale challenges included hundreds of petabytes.

Solution

Requirements met with Aerospike

When their legacy NoSQL database couldn’t deliver results without a deterioration in performance, PayPal turned to Aerospike. With its high-performance NoSQL database, Aerospike is built explicitly to run on flash and Persistent Memory (PMem), not DRAM, while consistently delivering speed at scale. Here’s what Aerospike was able to do for PayPal:

Meet SLAs 99.95%

Meet fraud calculation SLAs 99.95% of the time, up from 98.5%, reducing fraud exposure by 30x.

Cost effectively scale up and out

Handle extreme 32% annual growth in data and objects while keeping total cost of operations low.

Improve query performance and data consistency

Strongly conistent data simplifies application logic and thus query performance simultaneously.

99.99% uptime

Maintain consistent high availability in a 24/7 environment necessary for digital payments.

Slash data load times

While providing reliable access to fresh data; 12x reduction in re-indexing time.

8 million TPS

Enable more than eight million executions per second across database environments, which includes RDBMS and NoSQL systems.

Benefits

Initial benefits realized with Aerospike

Based on PayPal’s initial projected fraud data size of 50 TB in 2015 with its legacy in-memory system, these were the benefits with the Aerospike^® Hybrid Memory Architecture™: