Bayad (CIS Bayad Center, Inc.) is the largest multi-channel payment platform in the Philippines, and the country’s pioneer in outsourced payment collection. We spoke to Mel Migriño, Chief Information Service Officer, Meralco Group to understand her strategy to go for container based and serverless architecture strategy. An Excerpt.
How large is your addressable customer base?
The total addressable market is 50 million for the billing institutions that Bayad collects for. With Bayad processing over 11 million payment transactions monthly, there is still a huge market ready to be served, both in the over-the-counter and digital space.
Why did you go for container based and serverless architecture?
Bayad opted to use serverless and cloud native environment to allow our developers to be more agile in building and running applications.
Apart from that, we are fully taking advantage of the distributed, scalable, flexible nature of serverless environment, making us more focused on writing code while creating business value, and keeping our customers happy. Going serverless enables us to run our new Bayad applications smoothly, paving the way to an improved payment experience for Filipinos as they continue to navigate their way in the new normal.
“Bayad took aproactive stance to carry on in its digital transformation (DX) journey even prior the pandemic strikes anchoring from its goal to continue to lead in the payments and fintech space”
Mel Migriño, Chief Information Service Officer, Meralco Group.
Are you completely into public cloud with SaaS model, if yes, which public cloud are you in and how are you consuming the services?
We are using AWS cloud leveraging on the following services:
- Serverless ILambda and Fargate)
- AWS Landing Zone
- Log Management (CloudWatch and CloudTrail)
- CI/CD (AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild)
As a CIO, what were your challenges before and why did you choose Aqua Security against the competition?
Bayad took a proactive stance to carry on in its digital transformation (DX) journey even prior the pandemic strikes anchoring from its goal to continue to lead in the payments and fintech space while delivering innovative solutions that will adopt to the lifestyle of each Filipino. With the combined capabilities and resources that Bayad has set forth to serve its customers and partners in a seamless fashion, we cannot discount the fact that securing its data and digital platforms is considered a key imperative on how Bayad viewed the stability of its digital platforms.
We have encountered challenges on
- lack of visibility on workloads and cloud environment per se
- tedious time to verify components in the registry
- slow transition from DevOps to SecDevOps
To address those challenges, we have chosen Aqua Security because of the robust functionalities of the platform that support our serverless and containerised environment. But more to that, is the partnership that Aqua Security and Gefura extended to the Bayad Team. We experienced rough times during its initial implementation as we encountered some challenges in the integration given certain complexities on how we designed our cloud infrastructure and timing vis a vis time to market but with Aqua Security’s patience and expertise, collectively we were able to resolve the challenges and all other succeeding releases are successful. Truly as a team, we can say that we have achieved the ROI of DX which is digital business growth more than business survival during the time of pandemic.
What is the prediction of customers’ growth and application growth for next one year? What is your tech roadmap?
Target Customer Growth for the year: To reach 1M customers/wallets by end of 2022 for Bayad’s proprietary digital channels, Bayad Online and App
Target Application Growth for year: 6% increase month on month
Tech Roadmap: Bayad will be expanding its consumer offerings in the mobile app to include Savings account, Loans, Insurance offerings, eGaming, EMV and ATM cards. Moreover, Bayad is also set to grow its enterprise solutions with Bayad Express and Checkout, Bayad’s own payment gateway, as well as Bayad Payout, offering payroll and disbursement solutions to various organizations. Bayad is likewise set to launch Bayad Asenso this quarter, a solution that allows micro and small businesses to offer Bayad services in their respective communities.
