Oceanbase Supports Palmpay to Reduce Its Database Cost by 80%

by Company Announcement
1 November 2023

OceanBase, an enterprise-level distributed relational database provider, announced that its database solution has been deployed and put into operation in the core IT systems of PalmPay, a leading fintech platform in Africa.

PalmPay, the first Africa-based customer to adopt OceanBase, has transitioned its accounting, transaction, payment, and billing systems to OceanBase Cloud. This cloud-based database service not only boosts the performance of PalmPay’s database infrastructure, but also provides advanced capabilities like efficient data compression, distributed expansion, financial-grade disaster recovery in multi-availability zones, and streamlined unitised deployment support. Additionally, OceanBase’s comprehensive operation platform significantly improves the efficiency of PalmPay’s day-to-day database operations and management.

Since launching in 2019, PalmPay has rapidly emerged as one of the leading and fastest-growing financial service providers in Africa. PalmPay provides a range of financial services through its smartphone apps, including money transfers, bill payments, credit services, and savings.

The platform serves a user base of over 30 million people and maintains an extensive network of 1.1 million businesses, comprising 500,000 mobile money agents and 600,000 merchants. Today, PalmPay processes up to 15 million transactions daily, with billions of US dollars transacted monthly.

With its rapid user growth, PalmPay saw its transaction volume surging exponentially, resulting in increased complexities and elevated database management costs. In response to this, PalmPay initiated a database system upgrade and, after a thorough assessment of available solutions in terms of scalability, performance, stability and cost-efficiency, the company decided to partner with OceanBase.

Sofia Zab

“OceanBase not only assists us in addressing the challenges that come with rapid business growth, including transitioning to next-generation technical architecture and supporting high-frequency transactions, but also significantly enhances our cost-efficiency,”

said Sofia Zab, Chief Marketing Officer of PalmPay.

With OceanBase Cloud, PalmPay managed to reduce its core accounting database costs by 86% and its financial history database costs by 71%, resulting in an impressive 80% reduction in monthly database related expenses.

OceanBase database has been deployed to support all the core systems of Alipay and has also been adopted by e-wallets across the world such as GCash in the Philippines and DANA in Indonesia. These examples highlight the trustworthiness of OceanBase’s technology, Zab added.

So far, OceanBase has offered both cloud and on-premise versions of its database product. The company has also provided customized solutions to meet the diverse needs of enterprises of different kinds. The database provider serves a wide range of industries, including finance, energy, telecommunications, and the internet.