Monoova is a fast-growing Australian Fintech scale-up providing real-time payment solutions to businesses. Having grown from 200,000 to 6 million business accounts in 5 years, Monoova has also created 13% of Australia’s PayID since the inception of NPP, and processed over $100 billion in payments.
Dealing with critical financial information from hundreds of organisations in highly regulated industries means Monoova needs to put data security and compliance first.
But this is easier said than done.
Navigating an increasingly complex security and compliance landscape
The increased reliance on the cloud, combined with more regulations requiring extra resilience capabilities, means that financial services organisations are facing increasingly complex data security and compliance challenges.
APRA’s chair John Lonsdale recently warned the financial sector about cybersecurity non-compliance, mentioning CPS 230 as one of the upcoming regulations organisations should start preparing to comply with ahead of the July 2025 deadline.
On November 3rd, 2023, Brad Jones, Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) gave a speech in which he listed the “Outside Operational Risk (Cloud Concentration Risk)” as one of the main threats to financial stability.
“Multi” “cloud” or “multi-cloud”?
A significant number of financial services institutions today aren’t using multi-cloud in a way that would make them resilient in the event of a data security or outage issue.
Many say that they are using “multi-cloud” but what they are doing is hosting individual workloads and data sets in different clouds, which doesn’t provide full resilience and data security or meet requirements from regulating industry bodies and government.
True multi-cloud resilience means having critical data hosted in different clouds at the same time.
For Monoova’s CTO, Nicholas Tan, future-proofing compliance and data security lies in adopting a true multi-cloud approach, and this is exactly the path Monoova has taken by working with MongoDB Atlas.
“Whether it’s in critical sectors like financial services or telecommunications, time and time again we see events such as outages seriously impact Australian organisations and their sometimes millions of users - the Optus outage from November 2023 is a perfect example," explains Nicholas Tan.
“There are great operational risks of not having diversity in an organisations’ core infrastructure, and this is why building real resilience with a proper multi-cloud approach should be a no-brainer.”
Working with MongoDB Atlas a game changer
MongoDB Atlas, which is the operational database underpinning all of Monoova’s services, was chosen by Monoova to support extra scale requirements as it was - and still is fast growing, as well as empower developer productivity as the company needs to bring new products to market and innovate fast.
Another key driver in working with MongoDB Atlas was the unique functionality that enables users to simply “turn a switch on” to automatically enable selected critical data and workloads to go multi-cloud, allowing data to be easily distributed across different clouds and providing resilience and protection for the workload.
Tan and his team simply have to choose the UI to reconfigure their posture to be multi-cloud, which takes only a few minutes.
According to Tan: “Our multi-cloud approach is pretty unique in the current Australian financial services landscape, and this is what has set Monoova to be one of the first Australian financial services organisations to align with the CPS230 framework, as well as at the forefront of ensuring compliance and resilience in an environment heavily reliant on third parties.”
“Working with MongoDB has been a game changer because it means we were able to quickly scale up at a fraction of the manpower required; it saved us from recruiting a full team if we had had to do all that multi-cloud work in-house.”