Aurora Banking
A multi-tenant digital banking platform with real-time ledgers and AI insights.
- Client
- Aurora Financial
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 7 months
- Our role
- Strategy · Design · Engineering
The project
Aurora needed to launch a modern, compliant digital banking platform serving multiple business tenants — with real-time balances, payments and AI-driven financial insight.
The challenge
Legacy core systems, strict compliance, and a need for real-time accuracy across thousands of accounts. Previous vendors couldn't deliver the performance or the multi-tenant isolation required.
Our solution
We built a multi-tenant platform with atomic ledger math, event-driven balance recomputation, role-based access, and an AI insight layer that explains spending and forecasts cash — all on a secure, audited foundation.
Services
Technologies
The stack behind it
Frontend
Next.js · React · TypeScript · Tailwind
Backend
NestJS · Node.js
Database
PostgreSQL · Redis · Prisma
Cloud
AWS (ECS, RDS, S3)
DevOps
Docker · GitHub Actions · Terraform
AI Integration
OpenAI · RAG · evaluation harness
Third-party APIs
Stripe · Plaid · KYC provider
Security
RBAC · encryption at rest · audit logs
Architecture
Multi-tenant, event-driven microservices
How it came together
Business problem
Aurora's legacy core couldn't support multi-tenant, real-time digital banking — and compliance risk was high.
Research
We audited the core systems, mapped compliance requirements, and interviewed ops teams to find the real bottlenecks.
Strategy
Build new alongside legacy: a modern, tenant-isolated platform that integrates with the core and migrates incrementally.
Design process
A calm, trustworthy product design and a reusable design system for web and partner portals.
Development
Atomic ledger math in transactions, event-driven recomputation, RBAC, and an isolated AI insight service.
Testing
Automated tests, load testing to thousands of accounts, and a full security review before launch.
Deployment
Zero-downtime rollout on AWS with IaC, observability and staged tenant onboarding.
Results
On-time launch, enterprise tenants live in weeks, sub-second dashboards, zero audit findings.
Lessons learned
Isolating the AI service from money movement (read-only) was key to both trust and compliance.
- A calm, trustworthy dashboard with real-time balances
- Accessible, WCAG-AA flows for sensitive financial actions
- A design system reused across web and partner portals
Tenant-isolated services behind an API gateway, an event bus for ledger updates, Redis-cached aggregates for instant dashboards, and an isolated AI service that only ever reads computed figures.
Aurora launched on time, onboarded its first enterprise tenants within weeks, and now runs thousands of accounts with sub-second dashboards and a clean compliance posture.
99.99%
Uptime
<300ms
Dashboard load
7 mo
Idea to launch
0
Security findings at audit
Inside the product
“Surface IT shipped what two previous agencies couldn't — on time, and built to scale.”
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