Executive Summary
A UK FinTech operating an employee financial wellbeing platform used by major employers had scaled fast without a formal architectural review. With FCA-regulated activity, hundreds of thousands of end users, and an increasingly complex multi-account AWS estate, the team wanted independent validation against AWS best practices before scaling further. Logicata delivered a Well-Architected Framework Review across all six pillars, surfacing High and Medium Risk issues with a prioritised remediation roadmap.
Customer Overview
Sector: Financial Services (FinTech)
Location: United Kingdom
The customer operates a financial wellbeing platform that large UK employers (NHS trusts, retail chains, hospitality groups) use to give employees access to earned wages, savings tools, pensions management, and budgeting features through a smartphone app. The platform processes financial transactions, integrates with payroll systems, and handles sensitive personal and financial data for hundreds of thousands of end users.
The Challenge
Rapid platform growth had outpaced architectural review:
- Financial data sensitivity. Wage access, savings, and pension transactions need robust security as a baseline, not as an upgrade path.
- Scale and reliability. Employees of major employers (including NHS trusts) depend on the platform for time-sensitive financial actions. High availability is non-optional.
- A complex multi-account environment. A large AWS Organization with many accounts needed governance assessment in its own right.
- FCA regulation. FCA-regulated activities require demonstrable operational resilience. Self-assessment is not enough.
- No independent review. The platform had scaled rapidly without formal assessment against best practices. Founding decisions were now load-bearing.
The Solution
Logicata conducted a formal AWS Well-Architected Framework Review of the customer’s UK production workload:
How the review ran
- 30-minute scoping call to identify the workload boundaries and key architectural decisions
- 2-hour workshop reviewing the production workload against all six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimisation, and Sustainability
- Formal report documenting all identified High Risk and Medium Risk Issues with remediation plans
- Review meeting to prioritise findings against business and regulatory risk appetite, and agree the implementation roadmap
Why the six-pillar shape matters here
For a FinTech, you can’t pick three of the six pillars and call it done. Operational Excellence touches incident response, which touches FCA reporting. Security touches encryption, which touches PSD2 evidence. Reliability touches multi-AZ failover, which touches operational resilience requirements. The review treats them as a connected system, not a checklist.
Results
- Comprehensive six-pillar assessment of the UK production FinTech workload
- High and Medium Risk Issues identified with clear remediation priorities
- Prioritised roadmap aligned to regulatory and business risk appetite, so investment goes where it matters first
- Independent validation that supports FCA regulatory compliance evidence
- Architecture diagram and account structure documented during the review process
- Foundation for ongoing Well-Architected practices within the engineering team
AWS Services Used
- AWS Well-Architected Tool
- AWS Organizations
- Amazon ECS / EKS
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon DynamoDB
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS IAM
About Logicata
Logicata is an AWS Advanced Partner holding the AWS Cloud Operations Management Competency, validated through an independent third-party audit. Logicata helps organisations build and operate secure, well-governed cloud platforms on AWS, enabling customers to reduce operational risk, meet assurance expectations, and scale with confidence.
