Re-Platforming Document Management for Payments on AWS

Company: Absa Group
Industry: Financial Services
Company Size: 30 000+ Employees

About the Company

Absa Group Limited is one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services providers, serving millions of customers across 12 countries. Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Absa offers a wide range of services including personal and business banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth management, and insurance. With a strong focus on digital transformation, Absa continues to modernize its operations and deliver innovative financial solutions to remain competitive in an evolving global market.

The Challenge

Previously, Absa’s document management solution was built in-house and managed under the ODP (Open Digital Platform). However, several challenges arose over time:

Ownership misalignment: Although the solution was widely used across major business units (AFS, Home Loans, RBB, etc.), the Payments team was responsible for maintaining it, creating inefficiencies.
Technology limitations: Innovation within the ODP environment slowed down, and the platform became outdated.
Scattered responsibilities: During and after Covid, projects were split across different systems, creating fragmentation and complexity.
Access and governance challenges: Direct AWS access across multiple teams would have required significant IAM and access policy management, adding risk and overhead.

To overcome these challenges, Absa initiated a re-platforming effort, moving the document management solution into AWS and making it the strategic solution for Payments across Africa.

Our Solution

The project re-platformed Absa’s document management capability into AWS, with a focus on scalability, security, and long-term sustainability.

Key implementation details:

Document storage in AWS S3: All payments-related documents and messages are now stored in Amazon S3, ensuring durability and scalability.
Lifecycle management: Documents remain in S3 for five years, after which they are automatically transitioned to Amazon S3 Glacier for cost-efficient archival storage.
API integration via Amber team: The Amber team (based in the Czech Republic) manages AWS accounts and provides controlled API integrations into AWS, ensuring that only authorized services and teams can access the environment. This central governance model avoids excessive IAM sprawl.
Modernized development approach: Leveraged Kubernetes, DevOps pipelines, and automation for deployment and scaling.
Strategic alignment: The solution was repositioned as the central document solution for Payments, replacing the older ODP-based system and aligning with the broader enterprise content management (ECM) migration from IBM to AWS.

Benefits to the client

Increased efficiency: Payments is no longer burdened with maintaining a tool that served other business units; responsibility has been shifted into a strategic, AWS-native platform.
Cost optimization: Lifecycle rules (S3 to Glacier) ensure cost-effective long-term document storage.
Scalability and resilience: AWS provides elastic storage and computing power, ensuring the solution scales with growing transaction volumes.
Improved governance and security: Centralized AWS account management via the Amber team ensures tighter access control and reduces operational risk.
Future readiness: Positioned Absa to expand payments document solutions across Africa, with improved integration and innovation capabilities.

Technologies and Methodologies Used

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Glacier

By re-platforming its document management solution to AWS, Absa successfully overcame legacy limitations and established a scalable, secure, and future-ready platform for payments. The migration not only reduced operational inefficiencies and costs but also strengthened governance and improved alignment with enterprise-wide modernization efforts. With AWS as the foundation, Absa is now better positioned to drive innovation, expand across Africa, and support growing transaction volumes with confidence.

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