Solution
GCash, the Philippines' #1 fintech super app serving 80% of Filipinos and 6 million merchants, ingests transaction data from mobile wallets, digital payments, and merchant platforms into a scalable cloud architecture supporting mission-critical financial operations. The platform combines transactional processing via ECS and RDS for high-concurrency payment clearing, with big data analytics through MaxCompute and real-time intelligence via Hologres enabling fraud detection and personalized financial recommendations. ZOLOZ Real ID ensures trusted user onboarding, while comprehensive security services (WAF, Anti-DDoS, Log Service) protect against threats, and Machine Learning Platform powers risk modeling and financial inclusion analytics at 24x7 availability.
Data flow
Mobile transactions/merchant activity → ECS payment processing → RDS/caching layer → MaxCompute batch analytics → Hologres real-time insights → recommendations/fraud alerts
Solution architecture
12 components · 4 layers - Compute
- Elastic Compute Service Foundational virtual infrastructure handling transaction processing and application services
- MaxCompute Large-scale batch processing for historical financial analytics and risk pattern detection
- Machine Learning Platform for AI ML models for fraud detection, risk modeling, and user financial profiling
- Elastic MapReduce Distributed processing for large-scale financial data analysis and pattern mining
- Storage
- ApsaraDB RDS High-concurrency relational database for transactional payment processing and financial records
- Object Storage Service Secure storage for transactional records, audit logs, and analytical datasets
- Hologres Real-time interactive analytics engine for instant fraud detection and transaction insights
- Orchestration
- DataWorks Unified data integration and ETL orchestration for GCash's financial data pipelines
- Governance
- ZOLOZ Real ID Digital identity verification enabling remote user onboarding and KYC compliance
- Web Application Firewall HTTP-layer security protecting payment application endpoints from web attacks
- Anti-DDoS Network-layer DDoS protection ensuring payment system availability during attacks
- Log Service Centralized logging and security event audit trail for regulatory compliance
- ApsaraDB RDS for high-concurrency OLTP and low-latency caching
- ECS for elastic compute
- Hologres for instant analytics
- MaxCompute + DataWorks for large-scale batch processing and orchestration
- PAI for risk modeling, fraud detection, and user insights
- WAF, Anti-DDoS, Log Service (SLS) for security and observability
- ZOLOZ Real ID for digital identity onboarding
8 in 10 Filipinos use GCash, and the platform partners with more than 6 million social sellers and merchants nationwide.
Along with the Machine Learning Platform for AI (PAI), it supports risk modeling, fraud detection, and user insights at scale by building and deploying AI models within GCash.
GCash partnered with Alibaba Cloud to overcome those challenges. It adopted a mix of solutions including IaaS, the MaxCompute data warehousing platform, the Elastic MapReduce big data platform and a Web Application Firewall.
