PalmPay Cuts Costs by 80% with OceanBase Database

On October 30, African payments company PalmPay officially launched its core system powered by the Chinese-developed OceanBase Database, making PalmPay the first commercial client of OceanBase Database in Africa.

As a leading African fintech company, PalmPay launched its e-wallet application in Nigeria in 2019. Offering Alipay-like functionality, the application integrates account opening, fund transfers, payments, wealth management, credit services, and lifestyle services. The application has over 30 million users and serves over 600,000 merchants, handling tens of millions of transactions daily and processing billions of dollars in monthly transaction value.

With rapid user growth, PalmPay's daily data volume surged from millions to tens of millions of records, dramatically increasing management complexity and cost pressures. The original database could no longer meet business needs. Early this year, PalmPay initiated an upgrade, modernizing its database and progressively migrating its cloud services to Alibaba Cloud.

After evaluating several database options based on scalability, performance, stability, and cost, PalmPay ultimately chose OceanBase Database.

PalmPay Chief Architect Wang Yilin stated, "OceanBase Database powers all of Alipay's core systems and is also used by several international e-wallets, demonstrating its reliability."

PalmPay has migrated its accounting, transaction, payment, and charging systems to OceanBase Cloud, maintaining the existing database capabilities while gaining additional advantages such as advanced compression, distributed scalability, multi-zone financial-grade disaster recovery, and support for the Logical Data Center (LDC) architecture. With OceanBase Database's robust O&M platform, PalmPay has also achieved significant improvements in daily maintenance efficiency.

"OceanBase Database not only helped us solve the problems encountered during rapid business growth, such as implementing a robust technical architecture and handling a high volume of transactions, but also effectively reduced costs and increased efficiency. For example, our core accounting database achieved an 86% cost reduction, our financial history database achieved a 71% cost reduction, and overall, our monthly database expenditure decreased by 80%," Wang Yilin said.

OceanBase Database provides a range of database deployment options with its Enterprise Edition, Community Edition, and ApsaraDB for OceanBase Edition, catering to the diverse needs of enterprises. It serves a wide range of industries in China, including finance, government affairs, energy, telecommunications, and Internet, while also expanding its global presence. In the e-wallet sector, OceanBase Database has been adopted by leading Southeast Asian platforms such as GCash in the Philippines and DANA in Indonesia.