Selfpay results after migrating to Microsoft Azure in cloud: „We saw a 60 percent drop in costs when operating at high-demand levels, and we reduced network latency by 40 percent.”

SelfPay is one of Romania’s leading go-to solutions for contactless electronic payments. The company provides more than 5,500 self-service payment stations across 1,000 localities. To keep pace with growing transaction volumes—which often go up by 25 percent during holiday seasons—SelfPay sought to increase both processing power and scalability.

This became a necessity following the COVID-19 health crisis and associated sanitary recommendations to privilege contactless transactions.

„By moving its databases to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, the company tripled its transaction volume-handling capabilities, ensuring reliable, highly secure, and efficient payments service availability for people across Romania,” according to a Microsoft blog.

Since 2009, SelfPay has been a leading provider of fast electronic payment solutions in Romania, running the largest network of self-service payment stations in the country.

“We handle self-service payments for pretty much everything,” explains Romeo Dumitrescu, Principal Software Architect at SelfPay. “People can simply go out to the service kiosk nearby and pay a bill or a tax, without human interaction of any kind. Our services are becoming very popular. We handle payments to the value of hundreds of millions of euros,” he adds.

“As people privilege more and more contactless payments, e-transactions are multiplying an urgent need for greater scalability. We were looking for a cloud provider that had the capability to match our fast-growing infrastructure needs while ensuring customer experience consistency. Azure checked all the boxes.”

Smoothly shifting toward seamless service

”People use our kiosks for reliable, safer, and efficient payments, so we had to make sure the migration of our whole infrastructure happened smoothly, with as little downtime as possible,” says Romeo Dumitrescu. “Once the Azure migration was finalized, our update delivery time went from two days to less than two hours,” says Narcis Dumitrescu, CTO at SelfPay.

The move helped the company ensure service availability—even as its transaction volume ballooned during holiday seasons. “We saw a 60 percent drop in costs when operating at high-demand levels, and we reduced network latency by 40 percent, resulting in quicker and more reliable services to our customers,” he adds.

When Microsoft offered SelfPay access to its FastTrack service—which helps customers rapidly onboard Microsoft cloud solutions and drive user adoption—”It fit like a glove,” he explains. “They answered all our questions and were very, very efficient. The platform swap happened over a single weekend.”

The company also sees major improvements in networking speed and connectivity, with its SQL query performance increasing by 75 percent with Azure SQL Managed Instance. “We’ve also reduced IT costs and time spent on infrastructure maintenance by 80 percent, so we can now focus on creating new services and features,” Dumitrescu adds.

“We can see how our customers interact with our systems, so we better understand the impact of activity peaks and can make more informed decisions about which products to roll out. In addition, the move opened up access to hundreds of marketplace solutions for Azure, so we can launch new third-party integrated solutions based on our needs,” observes Dumitrescu.

“Overall, it has been a great experience. Incredibly streamlined. Our infrastructure is no longer a pain point, it’s a bragging point.” he concludes.