How Ouribank achieved 60% cloud savings with a FinOps strategy and AWS expertise
The Client
With over 40 years in the market, Ouribank is a fintech leader in currency exchange and financial services — one of the main B2B players in this segment in Brazil, with over 700 partners and a strong presence among investment advisory firms.
Its history is marked by excellence in personalized customer service, reflecting a commitment to innovation, efficiency, and exceeding customer expectations. In 2023, the brand transformed to turn boundaries into new possibilities. Ourinvest Bank announced its rebranding, investing heavily in technology and governance to expand its business, aiming to become a multi-product bank, starting with the resumption of credit operations.
With over US 719 million in assets and US 134 million in revenue, the bank has a network of over 600 currency exchange correspondents and has completed more than 2.5 million currency exchange transactions, achieving an accumulated growth of 50% in recent years. Since 2021, it has significantly invested in digitalization and innovation.
The Client
In 2023, Ouribank experienced exponential growth, leading to a 147% increase in infrastructure costs. As an institution that handles transactions in various domestic and international currencies, it became critical to identify the specific costs associated with these operations.
In parallel with its revenue growth, the bank faced a significant challenge: the need for clear visibility into its cloud spending. Without this clarity, the continuous infrastructure expansion, coupled with the bank’s accelerated growth, made it difficult to evaluate its products’ return on investment (ROI), jeopardizing financial viability and strategic planning. Without proper controls, costs risked escalating unsustainably.
“In 2023, our cloud infrastructure costs quadrupled, and we lacked clarity on what drove these expenses. We knew costs were high, but we couldn’t pinpoint the causes due to a lack of resource standardization and tag tracking. As a result, we didn’t have sufficient visibility to determine the cost of each product and price them appropriately.”
Luis Eduardo dos Santos
IT Superintendent at Ouribank
The Solution
To address these challenges, leadership recognized the need to invest in a dedicated FinOps team. They hired a specialist to implement FinOps practices and partnered with e-Core to drive actions and disseminate best practices across departments.
Initially, e-Core conducted a detailed FinOps maturity assessment,analyzing Ouribank’s operational costs on AWS. This assessment identified inefficiencies and opportunities to optimize resource use for greater efficiency. Based on these insights, a roadmap was created using the FinOps.org framework, categorizing the implementations into four areas:
Cost Classification and Control
A taxonomy review resulted in the implementation of a tagging strategy for approximately 92% of resources. This allowed the bank to identify high-usage products and assign responsibility for optimization during the next project phase.
Daily anomaly and budget alerts were also implemented for key product accounts, enhancing spending predictability and preventing exponential waste.
Optimization, Savings Plans (SP), and Reservations
The bank prioritized cost-impactful yet low-operational-impact initiatives, starting with “quick wins.” This included shutting down idle resources and automating workload shutdowns during off-hours in development and testing environments. They also shifted ECS Fargate from “on-demand” to “spot” pricing.
Another “quick win” involved reducing over-provisioned resources. Using the AWS Cost Optimization Hub, the bank identified and adjusted these resources efficiently.
In Amazon S3, lifecycle policies were implemented to manage data life cycles. These policies automatically move less-accessed files to Amazon Glacier or delete them after the retention period. This approach reduced storage costs while aligning resource use with business needs.
Additionally, EBS volumes were upgraded to GP3, optimizing IOPS allocation based on workload requirements, improving performance, and reducing storage costs. Following these optimizations, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances were purchased for medium-term resource needs, securing more competitive pricing.
KPIs and Culture Development
After the initial phases, the following KPIs were established to ensure efficiency:
- Savings Plans coverage
- Reservations coverage for Redshift and ElastiCache
- Cost classification coverage via tags
- Proportion of Dev/QA workloads using Spot instances
- Automation coverage for Dev/QA workload start/stop processes
In parallel, leadership aligned on a FinOps best practices adoption strategy. e-Core also conducted a workshop for the technology team to enhance skills and foster understanding.
Results
The e-Core team’s consultancy and the implementation of new processes resulted in:
- 60% reduction in cloud costs
- 18% increase in availability and processing capacity
- Improved visibility and spending predictability for product engineering squads and executives
- Tagging implementation increased from 0% to 94%, enhancing cost tracking and control
- Greater operational efficiency and transparency, including 70% Savings Plans coverage and 100% Spot instance usage in Dev/QA environments
- Continuous and effective budget monitoring
- Strengthened FinOps culture
“Today, we have cost predictability and a clear mapping of our needs, providing much more confidence in our operations. In less than a year, leadership gained more security in allocating investments, while the bank continues to grow. We’ve implemented a FinOps culture that avoids negative surprises and has already avoided significant additional costs, which could have reached up to USD 1 million by the end of 2024. The process led by e-Core helps us achieve the bank’s strategic financial indicators.“
Gustavo Tortoza
FinOps Specialist at Outibank
Conclusion
Ouribank’s adoption of FinOps, with e-Core’s support, significantly optimized cloud costs while increasing transparency and clarity around cloud spending. This enabled better investment planning, ensuring efficient resource use and allowing the bank to price services and calculate ROI more accurately.
These practices also fostered a FinOps culture, enabling teams to understand costs better and make more informed investments. IT now supports the bank from both technical and business perspectives, providing insights that impact daily operations and drive Ouribank’s growth.
“The success of this project stemmed from the collaboration between AWS, e-Core, and Ouribank teams. While our team focused on the business, e-Core played a crucial role in providing technical insights and solutions. This partnership enabled tools for daily cost visibility and anomaly alerts, allowing swift actions on significant variations. The result is greater financial control and the ability to competitively price our products—essential for our growth.”
Luis Eduardo dos Santos
IT Superintendent at Ouribank
With more efficient processes and clearly defined responsibilities, the bank can now align investments more strategically with business objectives.
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