Customer Challenge
As DigiSquad expanded DigiMali’s user base and service portfolio, the platform faced escalating pressure across scalability, transaction reliability, partner integrations, and governance controls.
The legacy architecture struggled to handle unpredictable traffic spikes and higher transaction volumes—particularly during peak purchasing periods such as month-end electricity top-ups—creating risk of slowdowns or downtime. At the same time, as a fintech platform processing financial transactions, DigiMali needed strong guarantees of end-to-end transaction integrity to ensure purchases were recorded and fulfilled exactly once, even in failure conditions such as network interruptions or service crashes.
The platform also became increasingly constrained by integration complexity. DigiMali connects to multiple external partners (utilities, mobile network operators, payment gateways, and VAS suppliers), each with different APIs and protocols. Point-to-point integrations had grown brittle and tightly coupled, slowing onboarding of new services and increasing the risk of regressions. In parallel, DigiSquad needed stronger security and governance controls—encryption, access segregation, auditability, and compliance-ready operational visibility—to support regulated payments use cases and partner trust.
Without modernisation, DigiSquad risked stalled growth, increased operational incidents, and inability to scale reliably for national demand—especially under high-profile contracts such as Eskom prepaid vending.
Partner Solution
Tati Software partnered with DigiSquad to architect and implement a modernised DigiMali platform on AWS, using microservices and event-driven architecture patterns to improve scalability, resilience, and integration agility.
The platform was re-architected into decoupled microservices aligned to core business functions (for example user management, payment processing, and third-party service integrations). Services were containerised and deployed using Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, enabling independent scaling per service without server management overhead. This design ensures the platform can scale elastically during demand spikes while maintaining low-latency performance across the transaction flow.
To address integration complexity and improve extensibility, the solution introduced an event-driven model. Services publish and consume events through a central event bus, reducing tight coupling and enabling faster onboarding of partners and new functionality. Reliable asynchronous processing was implemented using durable queues for workflows that require guaranteed processing and controlled retry logic, ensuring transaction continuity even if external partners experience outages.
The result is a secure, scalable SaaS foundation built to support high-volume financial transaction workloads, accelerate innovation, and enforce strong operational governance.
Primary AWS Services Used in the Solution and How They Were Delivered
Tati Software delivered the solution using AWS-aligned cloud architecture patterns suitable for a secure, high-throughput payments platform. The implementation aligns to AWS Well-Architected principles for reliability, security, performance efficiency, and operational excellence.
The following AWS services were used:
- Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate: Runs containerised microservices with automatic scaling and high availability, without managing EC2 servers
- Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS): Core transactional database for financial records and user data, with multi-AZ resilience, backups, recovery, and encryption
- Amazon ElastiCache (Redis): In-memory caching for hot data such as session and reference data to reduce latency and offload database reads
- Amazon EventBridge: Central event bus for decoupled service-to-service communication and publish/subscribe workflows
- Amazon SQS: Durable message queues for asynchronous processing, controlled retries, and dead-letter queue capture during partner/API failures
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: Streaming pipeline for high-volume event data such as transaction event logs and operational telemetry
- AWS Lambda: Serverless processing for lightweight event-driven tasks such as notifications, webhook handling, and background jobs
- Amazon S3: Durable object storage for reports, archives, and audit artefacts (including end-of-day logs and operational records)
- Amazon VPC: Network isolation and secure service communication, protecting internal services and databases from public exposure
Partner Support Services (Pre and Post Implementation)
Pre-implementation, Tati Software conducted architecture and design workshops with DigiSquad stakeholders to align platform requirements to AWS Well-Architected principles. Proofs-of-concept were used to de-risk the event-driven patterns and validate transaction integrity under real-world scenarios such as electricity token purchase flows.
During implementation, Tati supported containerisation of services, established CI/CD pipelines to automate testing and deployments, and implemented observability through monitoring, logging, and tracing to provide operational visibility. Failure-condition testing was performed to validate integrity under outage scenarios, ensuring message durability and eventual processing through queues and streams.
Post-implementation, Tati continued with enablement and operational support, including knowledge transfer, dashboards, alerting, performance tuning, and iterative improvements. This ensured DigiMali remained stable under real production load while supporting ongoing enhancements and growth across new services and markets.
Results and Benefits
The AWS modernisation delivered material improvements across scale, resilience, transaction integrity, agility, and governance.
Key outcomes include:
- Scalability and throughput: Improved transaction throughput by over 5×, supporting demand spikes without performance degradation
- National-scale readiness: Enabled DigiMali to operate reliably at the scale required for Eskom prepaid vending, serving thousands of token purchases per hour
- High availability: Maintained greater than 99.9% uptime, including during peak periods, with no unplanned downtime reported during high-load cycles
- Transaction integrity: Reduced failed/lost transaction risk through durable messaging, ACID-compliant storage, and controlled retry workflows; incident tickets related to transaction issues reduced by an estimated 80%
- Security and governance: Strengthened protections through encryption at rest and in transit, network isolation, access segregation, and audit-ready operational logging
- Faster innovation: Increased release cadence and reduced time-to-integrate new partners by enabling modular service deployment and event-driven extensibility
- Operational efficiency: Reduced operational overhead by approximately 30% by shifting to managed and serverless AWS services with elastic scaling
The solution transformed DigiMali into a future-proof SaaS platform—scalable, secure, and extensible—supporting DigiSquad’s growth ambitions and its mission to broaden access to digital financial services across Africa.
About the Partner
Tati Software (Pty) Ltd is a South Africa–based custom software development company specialising in the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and purpose-built digital systems for businesses. The company focuses on building web applications, SaaS platforms, and enterprise-grade business solutions that replace manual processes with robust, centralised, and auditable digital workflows. Tati Software places strong emphasis on solution architecture, data integrity, access control, and long-term system maintainability, enabling clients to modernise operations while retaining full ownership of their data and processes.
Tati Software is an accredited AWS Partner operating at the Select Tier Services Partner level. This tier recognises partners with proven customer delivery experience and teams that maintain validated AWS technical expertise. Through its partnership with AWS, Tati Software delivers cloud-based solutions aligned with AWS best practices for security, reliability, scalability, and operational governance. AWS Partner Tier and Certifications Tati Software maintains a highly certified technical team, ensuring that solutions are designed, implemented, and supported by engineers with validated AWS expertise across infrastructure, application development, operations, data, and machine learning disciplines.
The AWS certifications held by the development team include: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (Foundational) AWS Certified AI Practitioner (Foundational) AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate AWS Certified Developer – Associate AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
These certifications support Tati Software’s ability to design and deliver secure, cloud-native systems that meet both business and technical requirements across a wide range of industries.