Volt.io: Building a Modern Data Platform in Just 4 Months

The Client

Volt.io is a FinTech company building a global real-time payments network powered by open banking. Its technology is designed to enable fast account-to-account payments, making payment speed, reliability, and access to high-quality data critical to its business.

Operating such a platform requires insights from a wide range of data, including transaction status and quality, bank availability, and the performance of internal processes. Bringing these sources together effectively was therefore essential to supporting both Volt.io’s products and its continued growth.

The Challenge: Building the Data Foundation for a Fast-Growing FinTech

Building a fast and reliable real-time payments platform required Volt.io to make effective use of large volumes of data from multiple sources.

The company needed to process and combine this data quickly and make it available for reporting, analytics, and future machine learning initiatives. However, Volt.io did not yet have the advanced analytics and data engineering skills in-house required to establish this foundation.

Volt.io needed the core of a Modern Data Platform that could support KPI dashboards, self-service business intelligence, ad-hoc analytics, and future data-driven use cases.

At the same time, the architecture needed to satisfy strict security and regulatory requirements, including PSD2, PCI, and GDPR. It also had to be scalable and designed to handle growing complexity without creating significant maintenance overhead.

Solution: A Secure, Scalable Modern Data Platform Built for Growth

Xebia designed and implemented a Modern Data Platform around four key principles: self-service, modularity and scalability, managed data ownership and security, and optimized total cost of ownership.

Deployed on AWS, the platform combined Airbyte for data ingestion, dbt for transformation, Snowflake as the data warehouse, Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) for orchestration, and Looker for data presentation. DataHub was also explored as part of a data governance proof of concept.

Security and data quality were built into the platform from the outset. Automated testing helped ensure reliable data reached reporting and analytics, while failed tests prevented downstream processes from running.

Finally, Terraform and Ansible automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration, making the environment reproducible and helping ensure secure communication between platform components. Development and production environments, together with automated validation processes, provided additional control before changes reached production.

Result: A Scalable Foundation for a Data-Driven Organization

Within just four months, Xebia designed and implemented the core of Volt.io’s Modern Data Platform, enabling KPI dashboards, self-service BI, and ad-hoc analytics. The modular, cloud-based platform could scale with additional data sources without service interruptions, while automated processes reduced maintenance effort and helped keep costs transparent and controllable.

The platform also created a strong foundation for Volt.io’s continued data journey, opening the way for future machine learning and MLOps initiatives.

Looking Ahead

With the core Modern Data Platform in place, Volt.io can continue expanding its data capabilities as the business grows. The platform provides a foundation for future machine learning and MLOps initiatives, supporting the company’s journey toward becoming an increasingly data-driven organization.

Explore Xebia’s Data and Analytics Services to build scalable, trusted data capabilities that enable smarter decisions and future growth.