Case Study: Clearent achieves real-time insights and hyperscale processing of 500M annual payments with Microsoft Power BI and Azure SQL Database

Clearent scales its modern microservices architecture to handle 500 million payment transactions a year using the Azure SQL Database hyperscale service tier

Clearent, a payment processor handling about 500 million transactions a year, faced rapidly growing data volumes (approaching 5 TB) and high concurrency from thousands of merchants and daily batch jobs. To unify and scale its data platform, Clearent adopted the Azure SQL Database hyperscale service tier and Microsoft Power BI for analytics and reporting.

By using Azure SQL Database hyperscale for ingestion, storage, and read replicas and Microsoft Power BI for analysis, Clearent achieved automated, near‑unlimited scalability (storage up to 100 TB and CPU scaling via read replicas by up to 400%), supported tens of thousands of concurrent users and merchants, and cut reporting time from hours to about five minutes—delivering real‑time insights for customers and improving risk monitoring and development agility.

Clearent

Zach Fransen

Director of Data Management