From retail investing and global card payments to large-scale lending, fintech platforms are being pushed to their limits. User expectations are rising, regulations are tightening, and transaction volumes are growing faster and more unpredictably than ever before. Across these domains, one theme is emerging clearly: traditional databases struggle to keep up with modern financial workloads at scale.
At RoachFest Bengaluru 2025, leaders from Groww, Global Payments, and Yubi shared how they each reached that conclusion, and why they ultimately chose CockroachDB as the foundation for their next phase of growth.
Groww: Preparing an Investment Platform for Its Next 10x
Groww is a digital investment platform and India’s largest stockbroker by number of users, with a mission to make investing radically simple. That simplicity hides enormous backend complexity: real-time portfolio P&L updates, spiky traffic when markets open, and millions of first-time investors relying on the platform every day.
From the beginning, Groww avoided a monolithic architecture. The platform is built as a true microservices system, with many small clusters of databases rather than a few massive ones. Combined with aggressive data lifecycle management, keeping only active transactional data hot, splitting read and write workflows and utilizing different kinds of caching, among other approaches, Groww was able to scale smoothly on MySQL for years.
But as the company looks ahead to 5–10x growth in users and transaction volumes, the team recognized a familiar inflection point. Incremental optimizations would no longer be enough. Groww needed:
Horizontal scalability without manual sharding
Multi-region readiness to meet stricter resiliency goals
Strong transactional guarantees and compliance
A migration path that minimized application changes and allowed safe rollback
After extensive evaluation and production-grade testing, including load tests with production traffic, simulating node failures, version upgrades, and validating online migration, Groww selected CockroachDB. PostgreSQL compatibility allowed their Springboot and JPA-based services to migrate with minimal friction, while CockroachDB’s support for flexible deployments, from multi-cloud to on-prem, were also critical features.
Today, multiple Groww services run in production on CockroachDB, giving the team confidence they can scale the platform’s simplicity without re-architecting everything behind the scenes.
Global Payments: Sub-Second Transactions at Worldwide Scale
For Global Payments, a Fortune 500 payments processor operating in more than 170 countries, the stakes are even higher. Payments infrastructure doesn’t just need to scale, it must deliver sub-second performance and zero data loss, 24/7, across the globe.
Historically, scaling meant deploying more isolated SQL Server clusters, managing complex replication tooling, and accepting downtime during maintenance and failovers. The result was mounting operational overhead and infrastructure sprawl, especially after years of acquisitions. Across the company, they were running 47 different databases and 250 different versions.
As part of a broader consolidation and modernization initiative, Global Payments redefined its database strategy. Tier 0 systems, the core transaction processing workloads, require:
RPO = 0 and near 0 RTO, 99.999% availability
Active-active, multi-region deployments
Built-in fault tolerance without fragile replication pipelines
CockroachDB became one of only three approved databases for these Tier-0 workloads. By moving to a distributed SQL architecture, Global Payments was able to consolidate legacy systems into a single globally distributed platform. In production testing, the results were striking: significantly higher throughput with far fewer compute resources, predictable latency even during rigorous chaos testing, and seamless upgrades without customer-visible downtime.
Just as importantly, CockroachDB gave Global Payments flexibility. Its cloud-agnostic design supports deployments across regions, clouds, and on-prem environments, critical for meeting data sovereignty, regulatory, and resilience requirements in a world where outages can affect even the largest cloud providers.
Yubi: Powering 10x Transactional Growth in Digital Lending
As India’s largest debt marketplace, Yubi facilitates tens of thousands of loan disbursements every day across products ranging from loan management, underwriting, transaction processing, and more. More than 150,000 loan applications are submitted daily and 87,000-100,000 loans are dispersed every day, all under the scrutiny of frequent regulatory audits. Their collections platform alone triggers about 1 billion customer interactions per month.
As Yubi scaled, its legacy systems began to strain under rising costs, growing throughput demands, and stricter compliance requirements. The company needed infrastructure that could guarantee:
ACID-compliant transactions
Auto-sharding with zero manual intervention
Cloud-agnostic, could run on-prem, on any cloud, etc.
Sustainable costs
CockroachDB provided the foundation Yubi needed to consolidate services into a unified BankingOS. Its ACID-compliant, distributed architecture delivered the consistency and resilience required for regulated financial workloads, while PostgreSQL compatibility and MOLT tooling enabled smooth migration without overwhelming engineering teams.
“From a cost point of view, we needed to look at a slightly holistic number. Not just purely the cost of running one instance on a database, but the cost of engineering for resiliency, for the isolation of data, for a globally distributed database. When you add up all these costs that your business demands, CockroachDB might be a better option.” - Bharat Krishnamurthy, Chief Technology Officer
With CockroachDB, Yubi now has a cloud-agnostic platform that supports rapid growth today and global expansion tomorrow, without sacrificing compliance, performance, or operational simplicity.
A Common Pattern Across Modern Finance
While Groww, Global Payments, and Yubi operate in different segments of fintech, their journeys converge on the same realization: modern finance requires databases designed for scale from day one.
Distributed SQL gives financial platforms the ability to:
Scale seamlessly without manual sharding
Survive failures without downtime
Meet global regulatory and data residency requirements
Simplify operations as systems grow more complex
CockroachDB isn’t just replacing legacy databases, it’s enabling financial companies to rethink how they scale, modernize, and compete in a world where growth is no longer linear and downtime is no longer acceptable.
