Customer Stories

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

The results

30X

reduction in fraud transactions missed

15X

reduction in server footprint

$9M

hardware cost savings projected

5X

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

Solution areas

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™:

30x reduction fraud exposure

30x reduction in number of fraud transactions missed by improving SLA adherence to 99.95% up from 98.5%.

8x reduction in server footprint

From 1024 servers down to 120.

Costs reduced 3x

$9m hardware cost savings projected from $12.5m down to $3.5m.

5x throughput improvement

From 200K to 1M transactions per second.

Additional resources

Learn more about Aerospike