Fiserv Powers Enterprise-Scale Data Platform with YugabyteDB

At a Glance

Scale and Impact

Fiserv is the world’s largest fintech company, processing $1.5 trillion annually (14% of the US GDP). It serves:

3,000+ financial institutions
6 million+ merchant locations globally
25,000 financial transactions per second (at peak)
2.5 million merchants
90M+ DDA accounts with 3 billion+ cards

The Challenge

Fiserv must accurately and quickly process billions of daily interactions across payment networks, core banking systems, and fraud detection platforms. Its legacy database architecture was no longer able to deliver the ultra-low latency, horizontal scalability, and ACID consistency required to meet its mission-critical platform needs and deliver seamless customer experiences.

The Transformation

By adopting YugabyteDB’s distributed SQL architecture, Fiserv built a globally distributed keying and linking platform that processes 300 million daily records with sub-20ms API latency, while maintaining banking-grade consistency and zero-downtime operations.

Company Background

Fiserv is the world’s largest fintech organization, operating at an unprecedented scale in the financial services industry. The company processes approximately 25,000 financial transactions and 4,000 card swipes per second during peak loads across every segment of the financial ecosystem. This includes wire transfers, bill payments, and merchant payment systems.

Through strategic acquisitions, Fiserv has assembled an unparalleled data footprint spanning core banking platforms (DNA, FinXact, Portico, Precision, and Premier), payment networks (Money Network, and Star Debit Network), fraud prevention systems (FraudNet, and Issuing Advance Defense), and merchant services (Clover, and Cardinal Commerce).

This massive infrastructure generates what Fiserv calls “data exhaust.” This phrase refers to the vast amount of transaction and banking data that Fiserv generates through its operations. The company is working on monetizing and leveraging this data for analytical purposes and to improve customer outcomes.

Challenges

Massive write-heavy ingestion requirements with 300 million records processed daily from hundreds of data sources, requiring ultra-low latency performance

Concurrent transaction consistency required ACID properties across thousands of simultaneous Spark writers without data duplication or corruption

Complex schema evolution to support dynamic data models across diverse financial products without service disruption

Limited horizontal scalability, crucial to handle linear growth from billions to trillions of transactions while maintaining predictable performance

Key Database Requirements

Fiserv needed a globally distributed database that could support enterprise scale. Their requirements included:

Horizontal scalability to deliver 19,000+ IOPS per node with atomic Raft writes supporting thousands of concurrent Spark writers

Predictable low latency with single-partition reads leveraging local replicas to guarantee sub-20ms P99 performance

API compatibility with both PostgreSQL and Cassandra to accelerate development and support diverse workload patterns

Fast schema evolution with flexible DDL supporting zero-downtime updates as data models evolve across hundreds of source systems

Secure scale-out architecture with auto-rebalancing, encryption at rest and in motion, and role-based access control, meets stringent compliance requirements

Strong consistency guarantees using Raft consensus and DocDB architecture ensures ACID properties and prevents duplicate records.

Native vector search with integrated RAG preprocessing eliminates the need for separate vector databases and custom ETL pipelines.

Open source at its core, YugabyteDB provides deployment flexibility across self-managed, hybrid, and fully managed clouds.

Distributed SQL is important to us because our SLAs are very low, so we have to be very strong in our ability to scale and in our ability to do so in under 200 milliseconds.

Jay Duraisamy, SVP of Technology for Data and Analytics, Fiserv

YugabyteDB Solutions

Distributed SQL at scale provides peak performance with 19K IOPS per node while maintaining ACID consistency across billions of records through Raft consensus and DocDB architecture

Partition-aware architecture enables scale-out without application redesign, supporting thousands of concurrent Spark writers with predictable P99 latency under 20ms

Zero-downtime operations with flexible schema evolution, auto-rebalancing across node additions, and seamless upgrades, ensuring continuous availability for mission-critical financial workloads

Enterprise security and governance delivers zero-trust encryption, comprehensive RBAC, and API-based governance, enabling secure handling of PII across 70+ billion ingested records

Business Results

70.5+ billion records ingested with PII data, establishing a comprehensive financial identity foundation

9.2+ billion entity repository records maintained with real-time keying and linking operations

323.5+ million unique primary entities identified and managed with authoritative data resolution

Sub-20ms API latency consistently delivered for governance-enabled API serving downstream applications

300 million daily records ingested via write-heavy Spark-based processing without performance degradation

Zero downtime achieved since production deployment, including platform upgrades and schema evolution

Multi-cloud-ready architecture with planned Azure-to-AWS read replicas and disaster recovery capabilities

AI-ready platform supporting future vector embedding via pgvector and RAG implementation on YugabyteDB

Distributed SQL at the Core of Data Evolution

Fiserv’s approach represents a fundamental shift in how financial services companies can monetize their data assets while maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance, and operational excellence.

The Fiserv platform now processes tens of billions of records, creating unique entities that power fraud prevention, merchant analytics, consumer insights, and next-best-offer capabilities across Fiserv’s vast financial ecosystem.

The foundation of AI-ready, multi-modal, distributed YugabyteDB enables Fiserv to continuously expand its capabilities.

Future initiatives include multi-cloud read replicas spanning Azure and AWS, comprehensive disaster recovery implementation, migration of additional PostgreSQL workloads, and advanced AI capabilities through vector embedding and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) on YugabyteDB.

By choosing YugabyteDB’s distributed SQL architecture, Fiserv has built a future-proof data platform that delivers:

Billions of daily transactions with consistent sub-20ms latency
Zero downtime operations and ACID consistency guarantees
Seamless growth from millions to billions of records without architectural changes
PostgreSQL and Cassandra API compatibility, accelerating time-to-market
Auto-rebalancing, flexible schema evolution, and comprehensive built-in security
Multi-cloud deployments enable a rapid response to changing business needs

Discover more about Fiserv’s path to YugabyteDB and how it modernizes mission-critical financial systems at scale in this customer presentation replay.

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