Trustly Generates Insights 4x Faster Using AWS Services

As a prominent open-banking organization, Trustly helps consumers pay merchants directly from a bank account rather than using a debit or credit card. Trustly connects over 8,300 merchants to 650 million consumers and 12,000 banks.

The company started using AWS in 2015, and its infrastructure was built on AWS. In 2022, Trustly began exploring options to support its growth by modernizing data analytics and enhancing data visualization. Trustly chose to migrate to Amazon Redshift, which powers data-driven decisions with excellent price-performance cloud data warehouse, because of its scalability. As part of the project, Trustly implemented QuickSight and quickly built dashboards to help users visualize data. By February 2023, Trustly had migrated to Amazon Redshift and implemented QuickSight in under 6 months. “It was simple to develop dashboards and understand how Amazon QuickSight works,” says Ricardo Oliveira, director of data analytics at Trustly.

Since implementing its modernized analytics solution, Trustly has worked closely alongside the AWS team to provide feedback and suggest new features to continue enhancing QuickSight. “Collaborating with the AWS team, we can achieve results,” says Oliveira. AWS also automatically releases security patches and new features to keep improving Amazon QuickSight. “We just wake up in the morning and have a new feature in Amazon QuickSight,” says Denner Padilha, senior director of software and security operations at Trustly.

Using QuickSight, Trustly has access to its entire dataset from a single pane of glass, giving users a comprehensive view of data. Trustly also strengthened data governance and can deliver data to specific users rather than giving everyone access. Trustly’s data stays secure and does not leave AWS because there is compatibility across services. “There’s native integration between Amazon Redshift and Amazon QuickSight,” says Oliveira. “We don’t need to have anything between the database and the visualization tool, which reduced data issues and increased data quality.”

Using QuickSight and Redshift, Trustly estimates that its analytics solution generates insights four times faster than the previous one. “With the same team size, we can deliver more,” says Padilha. “The solution increased our visibility, monitoring, availability, and resilience.”

Since completing the project, Trustly has rapidly scaled the solution and increased the number of users from 80 to 300. Trustly estimates that the solution costs 50 percent less to maintain, helping the company use resources more effectively and give access to more users. “Because Amazon QuickSight is serverless, we can onboard more teams and users very quickly and simply,” says Padilha. Trustly’s data analytics team can also develop new dashboards in less time without needing extensive training because the solution is less complex overall.

With the previous solution, one analyst dedicated 4 hours a day to maintaining dashboards, and users often needed to wait for responses to queries. With the new solution, users can focus on value-added work. Trustly can also update dashboards that benefit from near real-time data every 15 minutes rather than three times per day, providing fresher data that leads to better insights. “We are launching new products almost every month, and we need to have key performance indicators and dashboards to support those projects,” says Oliveira. “With our solution built on AWS, we can keep up this pace.”

Using Amazon Q in QuickSight, a generative business intelligence assistant that makes it simple to build and consume insights, Trustly empowers users to self-serve their data using natural language queries rather than relying on technical teams. “Running queries increases the opportunity to make mistakes or pull out incorrect data,” says Oliveira. “By using Amazon Q in QuickSight, even our chief operating officer and chief executive officer can get involved and ask questions using natural language.”

When users can self-serve their data, they gain access to insights faster and can make decisions right away. The feature saves technical teams time as well by reducing offhand requests and redirecting queries that would typically go to the data analytics team. Over 6 months, Trustly users from the risk, data science, executive, product, and sales teams submitted 15,000 questions using Amazon Q in QuickSight and received answers with 89 percent accuracy. If Amazon Q in QuickSight doesn’t understand a question because of customer-specific naming conventions, Trustly’s data analytics team can make adjustments so that the service returns accurate results the next time the term is used. “Using Amazon QuickSight, users can access data in the appropriate format at the right time, facilitating quicker decision-making and fostering stronger merchant relationships,” says Oliveira.