Case Study: Zoona achieves 50% IT cost savings and 87% faster transactions with Amazon Web Services

zoona - Customer Case Study

Zoona is a Zambia‑based fintech that equips local entrepreneurs (Zoona Agents) to offer electronic money transfers and other financial services—helping more than 1.6 million people, about 1,500 agents, and facilitating over $1 billion in transactions. As the company grew, a hybrid IT setup (cloud front ends with databases on third‑party managed bare‑metal servers) created scaling bottlenecks, long procurement and deployment cycles, slow administrative changes, recurring outages, and sluggish transaction performance (~1.5 seconds).

Zoona re‑engineered its stack to a microservices architecture on AWS—using Terraform, Datomic with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and IAM—and migrated its databases and applications to the cloud. The move cut IT costs by 50%, reduced provisioning and management tasks from months to days, enabled elastic scaling (including nightly and seasonal scale‑down), eliminated reliability issues, and improved transaction latency to about 200 ms (≈87% faster), giving the company greater agility to grow and add services.

Zoona

Andre Penderis

Chief Technology Officer