Modernizing Real-Time Financial Services with Azure Cosmos DB
A multinational financial services provider serving 20+ million customers achieves 99.999% availability and real-time fraud detection with globally distributed Azure Cosmos DB architecture.
Client Overview
Multinational Financial Services Provider
A leading financial services company offering digital banking, payments, wealth management, and fraud detection solutions across multiple continents.
20+ million customers worldwide
Billions of transactions yearly
Mobile, web, and API-based partners
To keep up with expanding digital services and customer expectations, the company needed to modernize their core operational systems with real-time data processing and global availability.
Business Challenges
The legacy infrastructure created significant obstacles to modern financial services delivery
High Transaction Latency
Legacy relational databases caused significant delays during peak transaction volumes.
Regional Consistency Issues
Difficulty maintaining ACID-like consistency across multiple geographic regions.
Slow Fraud Detection
Batch-oriented analytics resulted in delayed fraud detection and response times.
Fragmented Customer Data
Customer profiles were spread across multiple disconnected systems.
Manual Scaling Required
Complex manual sharding was necessary to handle growing data volumes.
Service Downtime
Maintenance windows caused downtime that impacted customers globally.
Compliance Complexity
Strict regulatory requirements for data governance and security across regions.
Real-Time Financial Data Platform
Cloud-native, event-driven financial services platform powered by Azure Cosmos DB
Real-Time Transactions Engine
Sub-10ms writes for card transactions with multi-region writes and automatic conflict resolution.
- High-throughput ingestion for mobile banking
- Real-time account balance updates
- Concurrent write support across regions
Global Distribution for Always-On Banking
99.999% availability with geo-redundant data copies and automatic failover.
- Multi-region architecture across continents
- Local read/write performance
- Zero downtime during regional outages
Intelligent Fraud Detection with Change Feed
Real-time fraud detection pipeline processing transactions within milliseconds.
- ML-powered transaction scoring
- Instant suspicious behavior alerts
- Continuous learning from fraud patterns
Unified Customer 360 Profile
Single customer profile consolidating all financial data for personalized experiences.
- Consolidated account and transaction data
- AI-powered financial advice
- 28% improvement in cross-sell opportunities
Secure, Compliant Architecture
Enterprise-grade security aligned with PCI-DSS, SOC2, GDPR, and Open Banking.
- Azure AD RBAC and Managed Identities
- Private endpoints and VNet integration
- Encryption at rest and in transit
Real-Time Analytics with Synapse Link
Instant transaction analytics and insights without operational overhead.
- Live liquidity management dashboards
- Real-time risk scoring
- Zero ETL pipeline maintenance
Measurable Results
Transformative improvements across performance, reliability, and customer satisfaction
Global banking services with zero downtime during maintenance or regional outages
Transaction latency reduced from 100-150ms to under 10ms consistently
Real-time fraud detection pipeline processing under 1 second
Infrastructure management costs reduced with fully managed database
Customer engagement improved through personalized insights and recommendations
Scalable to billions of monthly events with autoscale throughput
Technical Architecture
Enterprise-grade architecture designed for global scale and reliability
Multi-Region Cosmos DB
SQL API with multi-region writes, automatic indexing, and sub-10ms latency
Event-Driven Architecture
Change Feed streams to Azure Functions for real-time processing and ML scoring
Security & Compliance
Private endpoints, RBAC, encryption, and audit logging for regulatory compliance
Synapse Link Analytics
Zero-ETL real-time analytics without impacting operational workloads
Multi-region Cosmos DB architecture with global distribution and real-time analytics
Business Impact & Conclusion
Azure Cosmos DB enabled the financial services company to build a modern, secure, globally distributed real-time banking platform. By replacing legacy databases with Cosmos DB's multi-region, high-throughput architecture, the company achieved transformative results.
This transformation positions the bank for the future of digital finance—secure, real-time, intelligent, and globally accessible.
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