CardX is a digital consumer finance company under SCBX Group, created to build a scalable, data-first credit platform for Thailand’s next generation of digital banking. Operating at the intersection of high growth and strict financial regulation, CardX required a core data platform that could deliver continuous availability, real-time decisioning, and enterprise-grade reliability.
To support its core credit card system, Silverlake Möbius, implemented and managed by Accenture, CardX adopted TiDB as its distributed SQL database on AWS. TiDB provides the scalability, resilience, and operational flexibility required for a core, always-on financial system within the SCBX digital ecosystem.
The Challenge: Scaling a Core Credit System Under Continuous Availability and Regulatory Constraints
As CardX scaled its digital credit products, limitations in its legacy architecture became increasingly restrictive.
The core platform relied on multiple database systems, including IBM DB2, supporting different components of credit processing and campaigns. Scaling required vertical expansion and manual provisioning, increasing cost and operational risk.
Figure 1: Original Data Architecture for CardX
This architecture led to:
- Latency during peak transaction periods
- Limited horizontal scalability
- Planned maintenance windows incompatible with 24/7 financial services
- Fragmented data across transactional and analytical systems
For a digital-first credit platform operating at scale, these constraints directly impacted customer experience, engineering velocity, and SLA compliance.
The Solution: A Cloud-Native Distributed SQL Foundation for Core Credit Operations
CardX selected TiDB as the distributed SQL foundation for its core credit card system.
TiDB was deployed on AWS EKS in the Singapore region, providing cloud resilience, regional reliability, and compliance-ready infrastructure aligned with financial services requirements.
Figure 2: TiDB-centric architecture for real-time credit transaction processing
Key elements of the implementation included:
- Zero-downtime DB2 migration: Approximately 3.4 million credit card accounts were migrated from IBM DB2 to TiDB using continuous replication, dual-write validation, and controlled cutover. The migration was completed without service interruption, preserving data integrity for a core financial workload.
- Financial-grade availability: TiDB’s distributed architecture and automatic failover eliminate single points of failure, enabling continuous operation for mission-critical credit transactions.
- Unified transactional and analytical workloads: TiDB supports real-time OLTP and analytics on the same data, removing silos between the Silverlake Möbius core system, digital channels, and downstream analytics and risk pipelines.
- Cloud-native operations: Running on Kubernetes allows CardX to scale database resources dynamically while maintaining consistent performance and governance under Accenture-managed operations.
The Results: Financial-Grade Scale, Resilience, and Cost Efficiency at Production Scale
With TiDB in production, CardX achieved measurable improvements across scale, reliability, and operational efficiency.
- Scalable growth without re-architecture: TiDB supports 20–30% year-over-year growth in digital customer acquisition without database redesign or service disruption.
- Elastic cost efficiency for financial workloads: CardX scales TiDB resources up during intensive workloads such as End-of-Day (EOD) batch processing and scales down afterward. This elasticity has delivered an estimated 15–20% reduction in cloud and operational costs, without compromising SLA compliance.
- Always-on reliability: TiDB delivers 24/7 uptime with financial-grade availability, supporting continuous credit processing and regulatory expectations.
- Faster product delivery: MySQL compatibility and simplified operations enable faster development cycles and quicker rollout of new digital finance products across CardX’s platform.
“Before TiDB, scaling required constant re-engineering and long maintenance windows. Now, our database grows as fast as our customer base. We simply add nodes without service interruption.”
— Kanognate Charoensedtasin, CTO, CardX
What’s Next
CardX plans to extend TiDB beyond its core credit card system to support additional workloads, including analytics, risk modeling, and future digital finance services — establishing a reusable data platform across the SCBX digital ecosystem.
Building the next generation of digital finance? Always-on core systems and real-time decision making define today’s financial platforms. Explore how leading financial institutions run mission-critical workloads with TiDB.
