Case study - Digital E-Wallet with Scotiabank Banking Integration

Overview

Peripecia is a Digital E-Wallet platform designed to offer users a complete digital payments ecosystem, anchored directly to the formal banking system through integration with Scotiabank.

Built between 2021 and 2023 over 18 months of work, the solution was conceived under the highest standards of the financial and technology industries, meeting the ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) and PCI DSS (Payment Card Data Protection) certifications.

The technical challenge

Building a bank-grade financial platform posed critical challenges:

1. Banking integration: Real-time connection to the Scotiabank core through secure APIs for account validation, transaction authorization, and automated reconciliation.

2. Financial security: Strict regulatory compliance — ISO 27001 and PCI DSS with certification audits.

3. High availability: Active-active Multi-Region architecture with a 99.99% uptime SLA and automated disaster recovery.

4. Scalability: Capacity to handle transaction spikes with automatic horizontal scaling.

5. Full traceability: Immutable audit logs for financial regulatory compliance.

What we did

Core Features

The e-wallet delivered a complete set of functional capabilities for the end user:

For the User

• Digital onboarding with identity verification (KYC)
• Virtual account linked directly to a Scotiabank account
• Real-time balance and transaction history
• P2P transfers between platform users
• QR payments to affiliated merchants
• Deposits and withdrawals to and from the bank account
• Push notifications for every transaction

For Operators

• Administration panel for Peripecia operators
• Reporting and reconciliation of transactions in real time
• Fraud monitoring and suspicious-transaction detection
• Management of merchants affiliated to the ecosystem

AWS Multi-Region Architecture

High Availability and DR Design

The architecture was designed under an active-active model across two AWS regions, guaranteeing operational continuity in the event of a full-region failure:

• AWS Multi-Region: 2 active regions with real-time replication
• Multi-AZ: Distributed deployment across multiple Availability Zones per region
• High Availability (HA): Target SLA of 99.99% uptime
• Disaster Recovery (DR): RTO and RPO below financial-industry standards
• Horizontal scalability: Auto Scaling Groups to handle demand spikes
• Global load balancing: Intelligent routing by latency and service health

AWS Stack Implemented

Security and Regulatory Compliance

ISO 27001 — Information Security

• Security risk management
• Access control and least privilege
• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• Event auditing and traceability
• Incident response plan
• Business continuity and DR

PCI DSS — Payment Data Protection

• Network segmentation
• Tokenization of sensitive payment data
• Vulnerability testing and penetration testing
• WAF + DDoS protection (AWS Shield)
• Continuous monitoring of suspicious transactions
• Immutable audit logs in CloudTrail

Development Environments

The project ran with three fully isolated environments:

1. Development (DEV): Continuous team iteration, synthetic data, automatic deploys from feature branches

2. QA / Staging (STG): A production mirror for functional, load, security, and banking-integration testing validated by QA

3. Production (PROD): An active Multi-Region environment with the full HA and DR infrastructure enabled, certified to ISO 27001 and PCI DSS

Turnkey Delivery

The project was delivered turnkey — Knot handed over a fully operational, documented, and certified platform, ready to be operated autonomously by Scotiabank:

• ✅ Complete source code with technical documentation
• ✅ AWS infrastructure deployed across 2 production regions
• ✅ Architecture documentation, ADRs, and operational runbooks
• ✅ Operations and troubleshooting manual
• ✅ Documented APIs (OpenAPI/Swagger)
• ✅ Validated ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications
• ✅ Documented and tested Disaster Recovery plan
• ✅ Knowledge transfer to the Scotiabank team
• ✅ SLAs, alerts, and monitoring runbooks

Value Delivered

Status: Platform delivered and operated by Scotiabank, with active users making secure digital transactions 24/7.