VTB Bank
Enterprise-Streaming-Infrastructure that processes millions of financial messages per second
For VTB Bank, H-Studio developed an Enterprise-Streaming-Infrastructure that processes millions of financial messages per second – with latencies under one second, full compliance, and 99.99% availability in continuous operation. The system now forms the technical backbone of numerous security-critical bank processes.
Challenge
The bank faced a business-critical modernization phase:
- The existing ETL system was too slow, too rigid, and not designed for real-time processing.
- The new platform had to:
- Process transactions and events in real time
- Detect fraud attempts immediately
- Continuously update risk models
- Handle massive data volumes stably
- Scale seamlessly – without downtime
- Fully meet compliance and security requirements
In short: a real-time streaming architecture that combines banking standards with startup speed.
Our Approach
Event-Driven Architecture
We developed a fully event-driven backend platform based on Apache Kafka as the central messaging backbone.
Microservices + Kubernetes
All services were containerized and orchestrated in a Kubernetes cluster:
- automatic scaling
- self-healing
- rolling deployments without downtime
Data Integrity at Massive Throughput
To prevent data loss and duplicates with millions of events, we implemented:
- a custom retry engine
- deduplicated event processing
- robust commit strategies
- in-memory caching for hot paths
Reliability & Observability
Monitoring, logging, and alerting are based on:
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- ELK Stack
This gives the bank team real-time insight into latencies, throughput, and system health.
Results
- > 3 million events per second processed stably
- Latency reduced from 5 seconds to under 200 ms
- 99.99% uptime thanks to redundant cluster architecture
- Data pipeline reduced by 40% → less operational overhead
- Fully audit-proof, compliance-conforming architecture
Technical Stack
- Backend: Java 17 · Spring
- Streaming: Apache Kafka
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Infrastructure: Docker · Kubernetes
Duration: 9 months Team: 5 engineers
Why it Matters
- The architecture principles from this project – event-driven design, microservices, streaming pipelines, and Kubernetes-orchestrated high-load systems – now shape many backend solutions from H-Studio.
- Everywhere that live analytics, transaction data, risk scoring, or real-time logs are business-critical, this system forms the basis for scalable, reliable, and secure backend infrastructures.
