Deep Dive: Building a Credit Card Payment Processing Platform and Payment Gateway on AWS

In this deep dive edition of Fintech Wrap Up, I explored how AWS empowers businesses to build cutting-edge credit card payment processing platforms and payment gateways.

TL;DR:

In this deep dive edition of Fintech Wrap Up, I explored how AWS is enabling businesses to build modern credit card payment processing platforms and payment gateways with its powerful cloud infrastructure. As payments become increasingly digital, AWS provides a secure, scalable, and resilient solution to handle credit card transactions efficiently and in real-time. By using services like API Gateway, DynamoDB, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, businesses can meet high availability and low latency requirements while adhering to compliance standards like PCI DSS.

The article delves into the lifecycle of credit card transactions, from authorization to clearing and settlement, offering detailed reference architectures for both the acquiring and issuing processes. It highlights AWS’s capabilities to support global expansion, manage compliance in different regions, and protect sensitive data through tools like AWS Payment Cryptography and ElastiCache. Key features include the ability to scale operations during seasonal spikes, maintain stringent security protocols, and automate monitoring for real-time issue detection.

Whether businesses are enhancing their fraud prevention mechanisms, optimizing tokenization processes, or ensuring compliance with industry regulations, AWS’s cloud infrastructure provides the flexibility and reliability needed to succeed in today’s fast-evolving payments ecosystem. If you’re looking to future-proof your payment systems, this deep dive is packed with essential insights!

Building a Credit Card Payment Processing Platform on AWS

The Financial Services Industry (FSI) is in the midst of a significant transformation and given the key role digitization plays, electronic payments are at the epicenter of this transformation. Payments are becoming increasingly cashless, and the industry’s role in fostering inclusion has become a significant priority. Innovation and development of digital economies are supported by payments which function as a stable backbone for global economies. There is a lot going on behind the scenes of a card payment transaction. A clear window into how credit cards are processed can help businesses manage their operations more effectively. In this blog post, we will illustrate how you can build your credit card payment processing platform on AWS. We will also provide two high-level reference architectures for credit card processing, the acquiring side and the issuing side of a credit card payment authorization.

Benefits

Processing systems are being modernized in the cloud to:

• Scale quickly and efficiently to meet seasonal spikes
• Maintain high availability while supporting increasing throughput every year and address stringent security requirements
• Support global businesses by expanding into markets around the world while complying with data residency and regulatory requirements
• Enable rapid prototyping for new product development

Credit card payment processing requires financial institutions to meet high availability and throughput SLAs combined with low latency.  AWS provides tools and services such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), and Amazon DynamoDB to support customers looking to build a modern distributed payment processing platform in the cloud and scale to thousands of transactions per second. AWS customers are using containerization as a powerful technology that can greatly enhance the availability of payment processing systems by isolating and managing application dependencies in a portable manner.  Organizations can achieve even greater availability and resiliency by using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to automate the scaling and management of containerized workloads based on demand, resource availability, and integration with AWS networking and security services. Automated monitoring and alerting tools can be integrated with container orchestration platforms to provide real-time visibility into the health and performance of payment processing systems, enabling proactive responses to issues before they impact users.

The AWS cloud offers multi-layered security with identity management to help customers meet stringent security requirements.  Threat detection and response services are available to help identify potential security misconfigurations, threats, or unexpected behaviors.   AWS offers modern networking capabilities such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS PrivateLink to allow messages to flow among payment entities without traversing the public internet.  Global customers can use multiple AWS availability zones and regions to expand to new markets. In addition, customers can leverage compliance reports and certifications from AWS Artifact as well as vendor due diligence mechanisms to understand and evidence the controls that AWS is responsible for. Customers are able to build a robust controls environment leveraging AWS services and resources to further demonstrate their adherence to compliance requirements in local markets.

Credits: This article was originally authored by the AWS team, you can find links on the full edition of the newsletter.