Case Study: PayPal achieves real-time fraud prevention at global scale with Aerospike

PayPal puts data at the heart of its fraud strategy with Aerospike

PayPal uses Aerospike to power its fraud strategy, but as transaction volume grew, it needed a data platform that could keep real-time risk decisions fast, accurate, and economically scalable across global payments. The challenge was to support multiple fraud checks at critical customer touchpoints while handling rapidly changing attack patterns and managing rising infrastructure costs at massive data scale.

Aerospike provided a hybrid memory-and-disk database approach that delivered millisecond feature retrieval and consistent sub-50 ms performance for most decision calls, even across 100+ petabytes of risk data. With Aerospike, PayPal achieved real-time predictive AI for fraud prevention at global scale, supporting about eight million executions per second and improving infrastructure efficiency while controlling cost.

PayPal

Sai Devabhaktuni

Senior Director of Engineering