New Way Now: Dojo is a payments powerhouse, delivering 60% faster transactions with Spanner
21Featured in this video: Rob Howes, SVP of technology at Dojo
Executive summary: With Google Cloud, Dojo is enabling millions of secure, reliable, and ultra-fast payment experiences daily, empowering businesses to serve more customers, cash up quicker, and thrive in today’s experience economy. As one of the UK’s leading payments technology players, Dojo is on a mission to transform how people trade, get paid, and manage their businesses — no matter the size. Using Spanner, Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database service, Dojo has achieved industry-leading transaction processing times at scale — processing millions of transactions a day with speeds up to 60% faster than the industry average. This speed and reliability translate to exceptional uptime for Dojo's customers, with the platform achieving 99.999% availability — exceeding the initial target of 99.99%. Dojo is also leveraging Google Cloud to embrace generative AI, using services like Looker and Google’s multimodal Gemini models to explore innovative use cases that offer more intuitive, natural ways to engage with payment data.
Challenge: As a payments provider, Dojo’s focus is on delivering unparalleled payments experiences — not managing databases or infrastructure. In its pursuit of speed, reliability, and scalability, as well as the ability to work across multiple regions, Dojo was looking to adopt a fully managed database at the heart of its transaction processing that could also meet the highly-demanding and dynamic requirements of the payments industry.
Solution: Dojo adopted Spanner as one of the primary databases powering its payments ecosystem. Spanner's ability to offer strongly consistent transactions, across regions, at virtually unlimited scale, enables Dojo to handle even the highest volume of transactions while upholding the security and speed guarantees of its payment data. Plus, as a fully managed service, Spanner allows Dojo’s team to work on solving the core problem statements of its domain instead of investing its valuable time and energy into database management and maintenance. Dojo also has access to the full power of Google Cloud’s technology ecosystem, including Looker and Gemini, to explore gen AI use cases, such as “chatting” with payments data to surface key insights and create reports that keep customers one step ahead.
Results: Dojo’s platform boasts a 99.999% uptime and processes as many as 10 million transactions a day, achieving speeds up to 60% faster than the industry average.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Rob Howes, SVP of Technology at Dojo:
→ “We see between six to 10 million transactions a day. We run in multiple regions, and we want to make sure that, irrespective of where traffic is rooted, we are able to respond to the dynamic volume. We chose Spanner because of the extreme resilience and scalability that it offered. We've been able to achieve industry-leading transaction processing times — 60% faster than the industry average from when somebody taps or swipes to having that transaction approved. ”
→ “Another positive impact we've seen working on top of Google Cloud, our incumbent peers typically have far more rigid release cycles, typically quarterly. Whereas, at Dojo, we're releasing across our varied infrastructure several times a day. [Our] ambition from a reliability point of view was getting to four nines, but as we used Spanner, we realized that we had an infrastructure that was even more resilient, a five-nines uptime availability for our payments infrastructure.”
→ “One of the things that we are excited about from a gen AI point of view is working with Gemini and Looker to change the paradigm that our company and staff use to generate reports or extract insights into a more natural language form. So, being able to converse with our data and surface those insights in a shareable form with our customers.”
→ “What’s been important for us is the mindset that Google [has] brought into the collaboration. They understand what are our business drivers, what is critical for our customers, and how to combine our forces to make sure that we are using Google Cloud in the best possible way to achieve our ambitions.”
Google Cloud products used: Spanner, Looker, Gemini
Learn more:
→ Dojo: https://goo.gle/3QLEkrg
→ Spanner: https://goo.gle/4kAXu0O