The Organization: Leading FinTech Company Powering Payments

This leading FinTech company powers the payment engines behind subscription-based, high-volume businesses. Their technology keeps high-volume transactions flowing smoothly by reconciling payments, preventing failures, and supporting thousands of daily transactions for major clients across retail, media, and financial services.  

Founded to address gaps in payment processing reliability for subscription businesses, the company has rapidly grown to serve enterprise clients requiring robust, scalable payment solutions. While they specialize in financial technology, their innovative approach to payment processing and reconciliation can be leveraged across additional industries, requiring high-volume transaction processing. 

The provision of reliable financial services increasingly relies on secure, well-architected cloud infrastructure combined with operational excellence practices. The customer’s serverless payment processing workload, while functional and innovative, had accumulated technical debt and security vulnerabilities over time. 

As the company grew, its development team expanded rapidly with each group deploying code with its own security settings, monitoring tools, and processes. This patchwork approach made it difficult to maintain consistency and scale securely. To better support their enterprise clients and thousands of daily transactions, the team set out to streamline their cloud architecture and align every deployment with AWS best practices, ensuring a unified, high-performing environment built for growth.

The Challenge: Disparate Security and Operational Issues

Critical Technical Challenges

This FinTech company had a variety of technical challenges.  

Security Vulnerabilities: Critical misconfigurations in IAM (missing MFA for root users, weak password policies), S3 buckets with public access enabling potential data breaches, and unencrypted data transmission exposing sensitive payment information. 

Operational Excellence Gaps: Lack of distributed tracing implementation, preventing effective debugging, insufficient observability across the complex serverless architecture, and limited monitoring of business-critical workflows. 

Reliability Concerns: Missing backup verification processes for critical payment data, inadequate disaster recovery planning that could impact business continuity, and insufficient monitoring of workload resources during peak transaction volumes. 

Compliance Requirements: Urgent need to maintain SOC2 compliance for enterprise clients and meet strict financial industry regulatory standards, including PCI-DSS requirements. 

Without intervention, the company risked serious exposure from data breaches that could compromise sensitive payment information to compliance failures carrying steep regulatory penalties. The architectural flaws also threatened operational continuity, creating potential downtime during peak business periods and eroding the trust of enterprise clients.  

In the financial services sector, where security and compliance are non-negotiable, these vulnerabilities represent not just technical issues but fundamental business risks. The company needed to ensure its infrastructure met enterprise-grade security standards while maintaining the agility and scalability required to compete effectively in the fast-paced FinTech environment. 

The Solution: Scalable, Integrated Approach

The financial services company selected Rego Consulting to lead their comprehensive AWS Well-Architected Framework Review. With deep, hands-on expertise in serverless architectures and a strong track record of successful WAFR implementations in financial services, Rego brought both technical knowledge and real-world experience in compliance-driven environments. 

Rego Consulting worked closely with the customer’s development and operations teams to conduct a thorough assessment of their serverless payment processing workload against all six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. The engagement utilized the 6Pillars Automate+ tool to expedite the review process and provide automated discovery of misconfigurations across their AWS environment. 

Starting with a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) of the customer’s payment processing workload, Rego’s expert guides provided them with detailed insights into their current architecture’s strengths and areas for improvement. The assessment revealed that while the customer had built an excellent foundation with their serverless approach, significant improvements were needed across all six pillars. 

The WAFR showed 61% of High Risk Items (HRIs) were initially passed, qualifying them for AWS credits, but identified 12 high-risk and 27 medium-risk areas requiring immediate attention. Throughout the process, Rego collaborated with them to address both technical security issues and strategic architectural decisions. 

Primary AWS Services and Implementation 

To address the higher risk issues, Rego suggested implementing the following: 

• AWS Well-Architected Tool: For conducting the structured review across all six pillars with comprehensive questionnaire responses. 

• AWS Security Hub: For centralized security findings aggregation and compliance monitoring across multiple AWS accounts. 

• AWS Config: For continuous configuration compliance tracking and automated remediation capabilities. 

• Amazon GuardDuty: For intelligent threat detection and security monitoring of suspicious activities. 

• AWS CloudTrail: For comprehensive audit logging and governance requirements. 

• AWS Control Tower: Recommended for centralized governance, compliance, and landing zone setup for future scalability. 

Strategic Remediation Implementation 

• Security Hardening: Implementing MFA for root users, securing S3 buckets with proper access controls and encryption, enabling SSL/TLS encryption for data in transit, and configuring proper IAM policies. 

• Operational Excellence: Setting up distributed tracing for better debugging capabilities, implementing comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems, and establishing proper logging retention policies. 

• Reliability Enhancement: Implementing proper backup verification processes, developing disaster recovery procedures, and setting up automated health checks for critical components. 

• Cost Optimization: Establishing CUDOS (Cost and Usage Report Data Operations Suite) dashboards for ongoing cost monitoring and optimization recommendations. 

Throughout the implementation of these products and services, Rego guided the customer past common pitfalls, simplifying complex remediation steps, and accelerating progress. The result was a seamless transition from a fragmented configuration to a well-architected, fully compliant environment designed for performance and scale. 

The Results: Immediate, Quantifiable Success

• 90% reduction in time and effort required for future Well-Architected Framework Reviews, enabling the review to be completed in hours instead of days. 

• 61% of High-Risk Items successfully addressed, qualifying them for $5,000 in AWS credits for continued infrastructure improvements. 

• 100% resolution of critical security misconfigurations, including IAM root account security, S3 bucket public access, and data encryption gaps. 

Operational and Strategic Benefits 

Apart from the benefits listed above, there were other benefits this financial services company experienced. 

• Enhanced Security Posture: All critical findings resolved, including proper MFA implementation, secure S3 configurations, and encrypted data transmission. 

• Streamlined Compliance Path: Automated compliance monitoring established to maintain SOC2 standards efficiently. 

• Real-time Security Monitoring: GuardDuty and Security Hub implemented for centralized visibility across AWS accounts. 

• Comprehensive Audit Trails: CloudTrail configuration, ensuring complete audit logging for regulatory requirements. 

• Enhanced Cost Visibility: CUDOS dashboards offering detailed insight into spending patterns and optimization opportunities. 

• Improved Observability: Distributed tracing and monitoring enabling faster issue resolution and better understanding. 

• Automated Remediation: Automated responses configured for common security and compliance issues. 

What’s Next? Long-term Strategic Impact

Guided by Rego, the customer’s cloud modernization journey has established a strong foundation for secure, scalable growth. Through ongoing Well-Architected Framework Reviews, Rego continues to help the team refine and optimize their environment which turned insights into action to ensure alignment with AWS best practices and the standards of the financial services industry. 

Planned next steps: 

• Full AWS Security Hub Implementation 

• Advanced Monitoring and Observability 

• DevOps Enhancement 

• Multi-Account Strategy with AWS Control Tower 

With Rego as a trusted partner, the customer is building a future-ready ecosystem designed to scale with confidence and innovate without limits in the competitive fintech landscape.