Sony Payment Services Migrates e-SCOTT Smart Online Payment Frontend to AWS, Boosting Processing Capacity and Reducing PCI DSS Compliance Burden

Sony Payment Services offers diverse payment methods to businesses that require payment methods for ecommerce sites and online stores. Launched in 1998, the company’s e-SCOTT credit card payment service connects directly to each credit card company, providing stable and fast payment processing with minimal risk of failure. While e-SCOTT initially only had a payment function, it was later upgraded to e-SCOTT Smart with added functions such as a management screen and sales data reporting. Other payment services have been added since then.

“The direct connection to credit card companies makes our payment system unique,” says Koichi Iguchi, executive officer and head of the IT Division at Sony Payment Services. “In addition to speed and stability, we also provide anti-fraud services. Authentication Assist Service is our unique, powerful anti-fraud solution that is realized by cooperating with each credit card company to match attribute information for payment processing with customer databases.”

Recently, demands for payment service providers have increased with the expansion of ecommerce payments. Additionally, today’s customers expect the same smart payment experience as they do at online stores when making payments physically. For example, a customer might reserve a taxi with his or her smartphone and register the payment method in advance, with payment completed automatically upon arrival at the destination. Sony Payment Services is focusing on these modern in-person payments and is working to enhance its services to meet this demand.

As more payment methods are provided, payment services increasingly require stability and availability. With a rapid increase in the number of payments processed, the company has been struggling to cope with the increased burden on conventional on-premises systems.

“For example, when concert tickets for a popular artist went on sale, causing a sharp traffic spike, buyers trying to purchase were sometimes delayed at the payment stage,” says Takamitsu Kamei, head of the System Planning Section, System Development Department and senior manager of the IT Division at Sony Payment Services. “We try our best not to cause any inconvenience to our clients, resulting in heavy lifting. Our clients have adopted the cloud for their ecommerce sites to process more traffic in a short period of time, making it challenging to predict peak load requirements. Therefore, to increase processing capacity as well as availability and flexibility, we started thinking about a next-generation system based on the idea of using the cloud.”

To migrate the most important payment service system to the cloud, Sony Payment Services selected AWS, which was already used by Sony group companies. From around 2018, Sony Payment Services started building other internal services on AWS to accumulate knowledge and experience before beginning the project to launch a frontend system that would directly accept requests from customers on e-SCOTT Smart, such as sending and receiving payment messages, aimed at a launch in 2022.

“The frontend system provides various payment methods, such as credit cards, convenience store payments, online payment gateways, QR and bar code payments, mobile carrier billing, and electronic money payments,” says Yuji Maeyama, head of the System Development Department in the IT Division at Sony Payment Services. “The existing monolithic on-premises environment meant that any issues impacted all payment methods. With a modern configuration that uses AWS or container technology, each payment method can be separated to increase availability, and it is possible to balance cost and performance by controlling resource allocation according to the frequency of payments.”

Migrating the frontend system was a major challenge because it is the core of the business and handles 3 million transactions from 30,000 merchants per day. “We received a wide range of advice from the AWS Account Team covering everything from the proof of concept to implementation, operation, and future plans, including suggestions for migration plans for the next-generation system and ways to optimize costs,” says Nobuo Koike, head of the System Management Department in the IT Division at Sony Payment Services. “We have also benefited from enterprise support. The AWS Support Technical Account Manager and the team collaborated alongside AWS staff in the United States to provide detailed support. Before getting deeply involved, we had the impression that AWS was a poker-faced company, but the team was incredibly warm and friendly, putting us at ease throughout the project.”