Koibanx Scales for the Future with MongoDB Atlas

The Latin American fintech market has experienced rapid growth and significant transformation in recent years, driven by such factors as increased internet use, smartphone adoption, and a large population with limited access to traditional financial services. Amidst this dynamic landscape, Koibanx was founded in 2015, in Buenos Aires. Today, it is a leading fintech infrastructure provider for Latin American banking and financial institutions.

Koibanx’s platform leverages blockchain technology to provide innovative financial solutions and services such as digital payments, asset tokenization, smart contracts, and financial inclusion. Thus, it is helping to redefine Latin America’s financial infrastructure by allowing instant issuing, exchanging, trading, and conversion of digital assets into fiat from within traditional financial institutions.

Given its ambition of expanding regionally and scaling services to generate value for the banking and financial sector, Koibanx needed to instill growth elasticity and guarantee security. To achieve that, it required the advantages of a non-relational, document-based database like MongoDB. “My job is to define the architecture, ensure services are resilient, and see that we have a scalable way of meeting commercial needs,” said Esteban Rey, Head of Technology at Koibanx.

The company’s legacy SQL-based systems were increasingly inadequate for its fast-paced, dynamic requirements. Complex infrastructure, sluggish performance, and poor scalability hindered Koibanx in the face of growing commercial demand. To realize its vision, Koibanx first needed to improve its infrastructure. “I’d previously used a lot of SQL,” said Rey. “It was very static, with schemas that are fixed and difficult to alter.”

In addition, the different blockchains that provide mission-critical security were incredibly slow, and with increasing data privacy concerns, Koibanx needed a robust security solution. To overcome these challenges, Koibanx migrated to MongoDB Atlas, leveraging its flexible document model for greater adaptability, improved performance, scalability, and ease of development. It applied the solution across three key use cases; direct use of blockchain, a central accounting mechanism, and connecting fiat with crypto.

To mitigate the sluggishness of blockchain technology—and the challenge it posed in terms of real-time data retrieval—Koibanx implemented a caching layer to serve as hot storage. This setup enabled quick access to transactional states without continually querying the blockchain directly. With MongoDB Atlas, Koibanx can instantly update and retrieve the status of processes, ensuring users have immediate access to information. “For example, if someone wants to know what state their order is in, I can’t click on the blockchain 37,000 times a second,” said Rey. “Using MongoDB helps us get that information quickly, and make it available to the user.”

Additionally, MongoDB Atlas provides comprehensive security capabilities, including:

• encryption at rest and in transit
• access controls
• compliance with various regulatory standards

An essential component of Koibanx’s transactional infrastructure is its ledger module. This ledger acts as a digital accounting book, relying heavily on databases, in tandem with blockchain, to securely handle complex data. With MongoDB Atlas’ powerful querying capabilities, Koibanx gained high availability, robust performance, and a resilient backbone for this mission-critical application.

MongoDB Atlas also underpins Koibanx’s complex and innovative crypto ecosystem, which bridges traditional fiat currencies with the digital world. Each service within this ecosystem operates its own database, and MongoDB’s capability to handle distributed transactions is pivotal. Koibanx can manage transactions across multiple services and databases, ensuring consistency as well as reliability, even under peak loads.

“We have absolutely everything our services need to operate and have storage on MongoDB Atlas,” said Rey.

Esteban Rey, Head of Technology, Koibanx

By adopting MongoDB Atlas, Koibanx is able to rapidly prototype and respond quickly to commercial needs. This agility means it can innovate faster. For example, when Koibanx needs to launch a new feature, MongoDB Atlas’ flexible schema enables the development team to adjust nimbly without extensive migrations or system downtime.

Additionally, the logical and natural workflow of MongoDB means developers require less oversight and supervision. “It’s intuitive for the programmer,” said Rey.

MongoDB’s built-in features (like automated backups, performance monitoring, and intelligent indexing suggestions) have significantly improved Koibanx’s system reliability and efficiency. When the company migrated from its on-premises solution to the cloud-based MongoDB Atlas, it experienced reduced downtime and better handling of replication tasks.

Koibanx benefits from MongoDB’s ability to scale dynamically—particularly during high-traffic periods—automatically adjusting to maintain performance and availability. This ensures a seamless user experience. Customer complaints about performance bottlenecks have been effectively eliminated.

“MongoDB immediately transformed our customer experience into an incredible one,” said Rey. “With just two clicks the performance of the system improved. Even in periods of rapid escalation, Koibanx can rely on MongoDB’s versatility and high availability to deliver our customers what they need, when they need it.”

Thanks to the scalability of MongoDB Atlas clusters, Koibanx can offer an efficient solution for Macro Premia, its rewards system. MongoDB optimally manages cache processing, enabling the effective execution of complex rules. In just 10 minutes, once or twice a week, the Koibanx platform can allocate points to customers, processing up to 4.5 million transactions. This approach ensures a fast and financially viable system, while the minting of points is securely recorded on the blockchain ledger, all thanks to the MongoDB Atlas SaaS solution.

Esteban Rey, Head of Technology, Koibanx