CASE STUDY
Scaling Securely for Trillions of Transactions: Alexander Forbes’ Pension Fund Transformation with WSO2
Product Area
API Management
Region
Africa
Industry
Financial Services
Highlights
78,000 Claims Processed in One Week:
WSO2 enabled Alexander Forbes to process a 6-month volume of 78,000 withdrawal claims, totaling ZAR1.5 billion, following South Africa's two-pot retirement system.
Scaled for Trillions of Transactions:
WSO2's solutions allowed Alexander Forbes to scale its platform to efficiently process trillions of financial transactions.
Business Onboarding Reduced to Minutes:
With WSO2's container-native architecture, Alexander Forbes streamlined business onboarding, reducing setup time to minutes.
Overview
Alexander Forbes (Alexforbes), established in 1935, is a dominant force in South Africa’s retirement, investment, and employee benefits sectors, managing billions in assets and serving over a million members. The company is committed to improving financial well-being, which requires continuous modernization of its digital platforms.
The recent introduction of South Africa's two-pot retirement system, a regulatory reform that allows individuals to access a portion of their retirement savings before retirement for emergencies, immediately triggered a massive surge in transactional volume. In the first week alone, Alexforbes processed 78,000 withdrawal claims (equivalent to six months of normal activity) amounting to ZAR1.5 billion. This sudden, massive spike proved the necessity of the scalable, efficient platform Alexforbes had proactively built in partnership with WSO2, ensuring they could meet this demand while maintaining stringent security and integration standards.
With WSO2's robust API management and integration solutions, we have been able to scale our operations, integrate diverse technologies, and deliver exceptional value to our clients. This strong foundation has allowed us to adapt quickly to evolving industry needs and maintain high standards of service."
Katlego Sejeng
Group Services Integration Developer | Group Engineering
Alexander Forbes
Challenge
Alexforbes was struggling with a foundational technology bottleneck that threatened its ability to grow and meet new market demands:
- Inflexible legacy architecture: The initial VM-based operating model lacked the on-demand elasticity needed to support rapid growth and peak transaction volumes. This inflexibility hindered new business onboarding and threatened uninterrupted service delivery.
- Complex integration landscape: Delivering financial-grade results required seamless integration across a complex, heterogeneous technology landscape, including AMQP-based brokers (like RabbitMQ), OpenTelemetry, mail, and file servers. The presence of data silos and lack of a unified operational view created obstacles for strategic decision-making and efficient service delivery.
- Developer productivity and technical rigor: The company needed to boost developer productivity for faster time-to-market, which meant empowering their teams to self-learn and quickly build solutions. All of this had to be executed while maintaining the non-negotiable standards of financial-grade security to protect highly sensitive data and ensure compliance against threats like DDoS and SQL injection.
Solution
Alexforbes chose a comprehensive, enterprise-grade solution from WSO2 to address its core infrastructure and integration challenges:
- Container-native platform: Alexforbes leveraged WSO2 API Manager to modernize its core infrastructure. By adopting its container-native architecture, the company successfully migrated from its legacy VM-based model. This critical shift immediately enabled the secure, scalable, and high-performance management of APIs, providing the foundation to handle trillions of transactions on demand.
- Empowering developer integration: The complexity of integrating diverse systems was managed using WSO2 Integrator. This empowered the Alexforbes development team to rapidly and independently build and deploy integration solutions. This self-learning capability directly enhanced developer productivity, leading to a much faster time-to-market for new services.
- Mandatory security and compliance: The implementation of WSO2’s solutions was underpinned by robust security features. This ensured that all sensitive financial data was protected, regulatory compliance was maintained, and the platform was secured against common cybersecurity threats.
Results
The partnership with WSO2 delivered actionable insights and quantifiable transformation, allowing Alexforbes to respond decisively to market and regulatory demands:
- Unmatched scalability: The platform successfully met the massive, immediate demand from the two-pot retirement system of 78,000 claims in a single week demonstrating its ability to handle trillions of financial transactions as the business scales.
- Streamlined operations: Complex systems were seamlessly integrated, resulting in smoother workflows and a significant reduction in operational complexity across the organization.
- Accelerated growth enablement: The adoption of the container-native architecture drastically improved agility, enabling faster business onboarding and expansion of service offerings, directly contributing to customer satisfaction.
- Guaranteed financial-grade security: The platform now utilizes enhanced security features to safeguard client assets and maintain regulatory compliance, mitigating exposure to cybersecurity risks and reinforcing customer trust.
Products featured in this case study
Alexander Forbes API Management to achieve these results. Explore our products to see how they can make a difference for your business too.
Our Products
Foundational technology for your digital platform. Digital experiences delivered as apps, workflows, and automations require powerful cloud native infrastructure to do the heavy lifting. Our products help you focus on the business requirements and leave the complexities to us.
Expand Your Network and Grow Your Business
Unlock limitless opportunities for growth and amplify your business success by harnessing the transformative power of WSO2.
Contact Sales