Convera completes migration to AWS to accelerate faster payments and improve customer experience

Convera, a B2B payments fintech startup, today announced it has successfully completed the migration of its payments network and customer services to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This move is set to empower Convera to offer a swifter payment network and improve the overall customer experience. The migration not only enhances payment network resilience but also fortifies security measures and provides unparalleled scalability.

AWS, renowned for its diverse cloud services encompassing computing, storage, networking, databases, analytics, machine learning, and AI, will play a pivotal role in enabling Convera to expand its business, boost agility, and reduce operational costs.

Currently boasting an annual revenue exceeding half a billion, Convera helps over 30,000 businesses manage FX risk and streamline cross-border payments. Leveraging decades of industry knowledge, a global presence, and strategic technology partnerships, this fintech startup facilitates smarter money transfers for over 30,000 global clients, helping them extract more value from each transaction.

Convera serves a broad spectrum of customers, ranging from small business owners to enterprise treasurers, educational institutions, financial organizations, law firms, and NGOs. Its offerings span from straightforward currency exchanges to sophisticated hedging solutions. The migration to the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud infrastructure promises a seamless end-to-end customer journey, addressing previous frictions and unmet needs with improved data flow, heightened security, and industry-specific advantages.

The migration to AWS brings several benefits to Convera’s customers:

• Enhanced Customer Experience: A 64% reduction in patching time and decreased human intervention due to automation, leading to improved security and speed across various payment channels.
• Efficiency: Manual efforts for application server cycles are eliminated through scripted automation, resulting in a 75% reduction in timing, from 8 hours to 2 hours.
• Faster Innovation: New features and services can be developed and deployed more rapidly using modern agile methods, granting customers quicker access to the latest solutions.
• Agility: AWS allows Convera to swiftly scale its infrastructure as needed, reducing the time required for procurement, maintenance, and capacity adjustments from months to minutes, enhancing responsiveness to demand growth.

In addition to these benefits, this migration also lays the foundation for Convera to accelerate its growth as a B2B commerce facilitator and further its digital innovation through product enhancements and enhanced scalability.

Remarkably, Convera achieved the migration to AWS in under ten months, a remarkable feat that involved transferring petabyte-scale data across more than 200 applications with hundreds of databases dispersed across four legacy data centers.

This was accomplished through a pioneering ‘lift, twist, and shift’ approach, where Convera ‘twisted’ its infrastructure to be ‘lifted’ by re-architecting and automating it using Infrastructure as Code techniques. This strategic approach facilitated rapid migration while positioning Convera for future innovation.

Patrick Gauthier, CEO of Convera, expressed his thoughts on the migration, stating, “This exciting milestone sets the stage for Convera to embark on a journey of innovation and growth in the digital realm. With improved security systems and data flow, our integration with AWS equips us to serve both our existing and future customers across the globe more effectively.”

Commenting on the milestone, Convera CEO Patrick Gauthier said, “This exciting development positions Convera to innovate and grow into a digital future. By enhancing our security systems and data flow, this AWS integration allows us to better service current and future customers around the world.”

“The recent update to the system that the Convera team performed has dramatically improved performance. It was particularly noticeable in a recent batch that had almost 1,300 payments with the upload time reduced by 60-80%,” said William Gordon, Controller at Cogent Communications. “In my process, the approval, reporting, and confirmation timing and lag decreased around 80- 90%,” he added.

“We’re pleased to work with a digital innovator like Convera in further harnessing its data to remain at the forefront of payments modernization, with speed, efficiency, and informed product investment,” said Scott Mullins, managing director, Worldwide Financial Services, AWS. “The scale and security of AWS provides the reliable infrastructure for Convera to deliver a frictionless experience and create new value for its global customers.”

Convera’s transition to a fully cloud-based system will significantly bolster the company’s capacity to advance its platform with a completely automated payments infrastructure and top-tier security measures for transactions.

Founded in December 2000 through the merger of Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation, Convera stands as a global B2B payments firm that extends payment services and foreign exchange solutions to businesses of all sizes.

Leveraging its expertise in foreign exchange management and global fund transfers, Convera provides access to a vast array of over 140 currencies and maintains a financial network encompassing more than 200 countries and territories. They deliver technology-driven payment solutions to a diverse clientele of over 30,000 customers, ranging from small business proprietors to corporate treasurers spanning various industries.