Founded in 2017, XTransfer is one of the leading cross-border payment companies in the financial services industry. XTransfer serves over 550,000 customers in over 200 countries and regions, with branches in markets including Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and the Netherlands.
XTransfer’s global treasury management platform—powered by a digital-native, automated, data-driven infrastructure—offers a comprehensive solution for various cross-border financial services. These include opening global and local collection accounts, performing foreign exchange conversion, and reporting for countries with foreign exchange controls.
As XTransfer continues to rapidly expand and adapt to evolving needs, it has experienced an unprecedented demand for advanced data systems.
To meet this increased demand for scalability and flexibility, XTransfer relies on ApsaraDB for MongoDB. Using a digital data infrastructure built on MongoDB, XTransfer can help small and medium-sized enterprises adapt to cross-border finance requirements.
Overcoming data complexity and fragmentation
XTransfer’s business-to-business (B2B) model is dependent on a long transaction chain. This includes stages such as inquiry, communication, customization, supplier search, production, freight forwarding, shipping, and customs clearance. As a result, a single transaction can take over several months to complete.
Managing this complex transaction process requires reliance on multiple platforms and systems, which previously led to data fragmentation. To address this, XTransfer required a more flexible database than many other financial institutions need, in addition to the ability to handle various data types and scale with demand.
Sun Lei, Senior Technical Director at XTransfer, explained that with the extension of services and the increase in business volume, XTransfer faced four core challenges in B2B cross-border data processing:
Data complexity: Efficient and accurate data profiling is crucial for business decision-making. Additionally, risk-control scenarios require extensive real-time data computation capabilities of large models.
Data security: The B2B cross-border model involves sensitive commercial information and customer data. This necessitates stringent data security measures, including encryption, access control, and audit trails.
Data compliance: Managing varying regulations across different countries is complex. Ensuring compliance with all applicable laws and global regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is imperative.
To effectively address the issues of data sprawl, complexity, security, and compliance, XTransfer chose ApsaraDB for MongoDB and its document-oriented database—one that enables a totally distributed deployment architecture.
Through powerful index query optimization and sharding, ApsaraDB for MongoDB supports XTransfer’s financial transactions, facilitating the storage and querying of vast amounts of data.
The real-time and continuous nature of cross-border transactions mandates extremely high performance and a stable database. Real-time monitoring of transaction data, fund flows, and additional information is also important to ensure smooth execution of financial transactions.
ApsaraDB for MongoDB supports various index types, enabling efficient queries on large datasets. For XTransfer, this means faster access and processing of transaction data, enhancing the user experience. When customers need to query their account’s historical transaction records, they can locate and extract the required data in seconds. This includes frequently queried fields such as transaction ID, customer ID, and transaction time.
Adjusting and optimizing to customer needs is paramount. And this requires database scalability and flexibility. ApsaraDB for MongoDB provides a dynamic data model that provides horizontal scalability to ensure that as data volume increases, performance remains stable. This level of scalability is achieved by adding more nodes as volume increases, making it well suited for handling high concurrency scenarios—for example, when customers generate a large number of payment requests due to promotions or sales campaigns.
XTransfer leverages the Change Streams feature of ApsaraDB for MongoDB to capture data change events—such as insertions, updates, and deletions—in the database. This enables XTransfer to synchronize data in real time with third-party business systems, such as risk management systems and data analysis platforms. And the company can perform all of this without the need for complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes.
Because XTransfer is a cross-border payment institution focused on long-term growth, continuous improvements in risk control are essential for data compliance and security.
In line with international regulations, XTransfer utilizes ApsaraDB for MongoDB to establish a data-driven risk control infrastructure to support its platform. As a result, XTransfer can integrate vast amounts of transaction data, supporting complex data analysis and enabling machine learning models to detect potentially fraudulent activities and abnormal transaction patterns. By examining historical transaction data, XTransfer can create detailed user profiles and conduct refined risk assessments. This significantly enhances the accuracy of its risk control measures.
By using ApsaraDB for MongoDB, XTransfer significantly increased the flexibility and efficiency of its data architecture. It also greatly improved the user experience by reducing transaction confirmation times and minimizing customer waiting periods.
Additionally, automating risk control processes has been a game-changer, reducing the need for manual reviews and mitigating the risk of losses due to human error.
XTransfer also bolstered its effective risk management by reducing the occurrence of fraud and regulatory violations, thereby protecting its financial health and avoiding potential fines.
All these developments have worked together to enable XTransfer to better guarantee enhanced levels of security and transparency for transactions.
Sun Lei, Senior Technical Director, XTransfer
Looking ahead, Lei observed that XTransfer’s AI team has extensive long-term plans in the field of artificial intelligence. The company’s target scenarios mainly focus on cross-border transactions and related areas, including intelligent marketing, customer relationship management, and fund risk control.