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The banking and financial services (BFSI) industry has entered a new era spearheaded by disruptive, tech-savvy and well-funded fintechs, expanding the boundaries of open banking. Organizations like Revolut, Robin Hood and Progressive Insurance have changed the model for their industry, and competitors—especially legacy enterprises—are looking for new ways to innovate and keep pace. As a result, digital transformation is increasingly on the industry’s mind.

In pursuit of modernizing, many businesses have begun incorporating Postgres into their database infrastructures. As an open source relational database management system (RDBMS), Postgres has become synonymous with innovation since its inception in 1996, and that reputation and popularity is only growing. At EDB, we’ve seen this firsthand—among major players and up-and-coming innovators in BFSI and beyond. These enterprises’ investment in Postgres has empowered them to achieve scalability in an ever-changing world.

Top players using Postgres

To demonstrate Postgres’ overwhelming popularity across industries, we’ve compiled a roster of some of the most dynamic businesses leveraging the solution as part of their database architecture, including some EDB customers. What all of these enterprises have in common is  their commitment to innovation.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley

Many titans of BFSI have been using Postgres for well over a decade. In 2014, EDB’s Vice President and Postgres Evangelist Bruce Momjian attended PGConf NYC, one of the leading corporate Postgres conferences. There, Momjian heard both of these investment leaders explain how and why Postgres empowered their business and fit within the expectations and ambitions of BFSI enterprises.

As Momjian notes in his recap of the conference, one of the prevailing concerns at the time was whether an open source project was suited to the compliance and regulatory structures of BFSI. However, as Postgres has demonstrated time and time again, the adaptability inherent to this RDBMS is ideal for enterprises that need to tailor their database management strategy to hyper-specific and incredibly necessary conduct practices.

Revolut

It’s not just the biggest names in BFSI that love Postgres, however. Take Revolut, for example. Launched in 2015, Revolut boasts the world’s first “financial superapp,” which allows users to unite all their financial assets and solutions in one hub, including stocks and crypto-currencies. With the introduction of Revolut’s own credit card, they’re bringing together both traditional and new ways to handle your finances, both for individuals and businesses. In fact, they have 18 million personal users and over 500,000 business users, with continual growth.

In a blog post on their Medium page, they discuss just how integral Postgres is to their database infrastructure and how it provides their application with the agility, scalability, flexibility and security that their massive user base expects.

NTT DATA ABIC

EDB discovered an exciting use case for BFSI organizations looking to modernize their database infrastructure through our work with NTT DATA ABIC. Looking to transform their packaged products and solutions into cloud offerings, this Japanese financial mainstay was concerned that using Oracle in the cloud would balloon their spending to the point where they wouldn’t be able to provide dynamic new offerings to their customers at a reasonable price. 

As a result, they opted to migrate their databases to EDB Postgres Advanced Server (EPAS), and almost immediately saw the benefits: lower costs, increased performance, flexibility and a cloud environment suited to the innovation they sought to accomplish.

Apple

Moving beyond the BFSI world, our next name needs no introduction. There’s a good chance they made the screen you’re reading this on!

Apple switched from MySQL to Postgres, using the latter as the embedded database for the OS X Lion release, all the way back in 2010. While they had previously been happy with MySQL in combination with Oracle, they were spurred to make a change by one of the most common struggles businesses face with legacy databases—fear of licensing changes. Luckily, they’ve been happy with their decision, even listing Postgres in their own app store. That’s an endorsement! 

Instagram

As of 2020, Instagram boasted that over one seventh of the world’s entire population used their application. That number of users, producing that amount of content requires a RDBMS that can handle immense pressure, while providing continual performance and availability for all the people who expect their account to be up and running when it comes time to take their next photo.

That’s exactly why they invested in Postgres. Combined with other RDBMS solutions, Postgres ensures that Instagram is constantly functioning and providing the memories and moments that its users rely on it for. Plus, Postgres’ remarkable compatibility features ensure that no matter what other solutions Instagram wants to build into its infrastructure, Postgres will integrate without a hassle.

Reddit

As one of the 25 most popular websites in the world, Reddit is known for the vast amount of content it produces across its thousands of “subreddit” verticals every single day. With 174 million active users, keeping the site live and thrumming along is a vital and complex process.

Reddit uses Postgres, not only to store the data for the majority of its objects, but also to house essential business information like site traffic statistics, analytics, ad sales, and subscriptions. With many subreddits administered and frequented by IT and operations professionals (including one devoted to Postgres itself), Reddit’s decision to incorporate the Postgres project speaks volumes.

Spotify

If you had to guess, off the top of your head, how many songs there are on Spotify, what would you say? Without counting podcasts, this music streaming innovator (which paved the way for other applications like Apple Music and Tidal), has over 80 million pieces of music, available to its 406 million subscribers whenever they want.

According to a post on their engineering blog, Postgres is a key part of their backend infrastructure. Drake’s latest album, brought to you by the power of Postgres!

What can Postgres do for you?

Over the years we’ve worked with Postgres, we’ve been continually excited and impressed by the project’s commitment to innovation and evolution. For businesses dedicated to those principles, looking to grow and transform, Postgres has proven to be a powerful tool. It doesn’t matter the size of the company or the industry in which they thrive.

In fact, the one thing that connects the diverse slate of businesses we’ve just mentioned is their commitment to innovation and growth. Some of these companies are bigger names than others, but those up-and-comers are dedicated to evolving, and those established names are where they are because they were and continue to be similarly dedicated.

Postgres provides thrilling opportunities to expand an organization’s horizons and to stay in step with the most cutting edge trends that come its way. 

This is a community of innovators. You can be a part of it, too.