Future-proofed architecture: redesigning Monavate’s data warehouse

Overview

Monavate demystifies finance, simplifying how people pay worldwide by providing a tech-enabled compliance, IBAN and card scheme sponsorship platform. 

As a long-time Star client, they entrusted us with redesigning their data warehouse, ensuring they stay at the forefront of the industry’s technological evolution while delivering seamless, customer-centric payment solutions worldwide.

The idea

Founded in 2020 with $6.89M in funding, Monavate achieved a 799% turnover growth between 2021 and 2022. It was named one of 2021’s most promising startups by Sifted and recognized as one of the UK’s top ten fastest-growing companies in 2022 by Beauhurst.

This swift expansion and integration of additional processors and providers has created additional complexity, especially around maintenance and data accuracy. 

To tackle these challenges, enhance platform performance and usability, and prepare for continued growth and scalability, Monavate has tasked us with redesigning their data warehouse.

Project

The success of this redesign relied on a combination of technical and business expertise from a diverse set of subject matter experts. These foundational principles were at the heart of this collaboration:

• Business requirements: The redesigned data warehouse should align with the organization’s business needs, considering data types, frequency of updates, data sources, granularity, and current state.
• Data integration: The architecture should seamlessly integrate data from various sources, supporting scalability and business processes.
• Data quality: Data cleansing, validation, and enrichment are key for accurate analysis and decision-making.
• Scalability: The process aims to enable the data warehouse to scale with the organization’s growth in volume, integrations, and user access.
• Security: The redesign prioritizes security measures to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.

The top priorities included overcoming data complexity and integration challenges, as the previous data warehouse faced “lost in translation” issues.

However, redesign doesn’t mean abandoning what’s already in place. There was a very strong foundation. In our work, we managed to reuse and refactor some of the components, allowing us to shorten the time to deliver the solution. Along the way, we took a nuanced approach to identify pain points, inefficiencies, and implement changes to the data model, ETL processes, and business intelligence tools.

Additionally, our team played a key role in supporting Monavate’s PCI DSS compliance, achieving PCI DSS v4.0 18 months ahead of schedule. Star actively participated in audit reviews, prepared project documentation, and passed security training, enabling a successful audit. Our combined expertise in card issuing and processing made this achievement possible and helped Monavate to facilitate smarter, faster, and easier launch and scaling of card programs for their customers.

The final result is a future-proofed architecture, with improved performance, data integration, scalability, and security. Beyond enhancing Monavate’s internal efficiency, the project created new opportunities for driving customer and overall business growth, including optimized data storage, advanced analytics implementation, and improved decision-making with accurate, timely, and comprehensive data.