Amnis: Giving SMEs the financial tools to compete with Europe’s largest companies

“Our ultimate goal is to offer tools for every international business-related task so that an SME doesn't need a traditional bank anymore.”

Michael Wuest, CEO and co-founder of Swiss payment service provider, Amnis Treasury Services AG (Amnis), is talking about how his company’s WebApp is giving SMEs access to the financial tools they need to compete with top businesses across the world.

“Compared to large cap companies, SMEs do not have proper access to sophisticated financial tools when it comes to things like foreign exchange and international payments,” he says. “So Amnis was founded on that idea – to serve SMEs directly with a cloud-based solution that gave access to transparent, fair-priced, and innovative tools.”

Now the 6-year-old company plans on expanding its services beyond Switzerland to the EU – a move that presented a number of technical challenges. “Our goal has always been to grow the business as fast as possible and expand to new markets, which is all very technology-driven,” explains Wuest.

“If you look at how neobanks disrupted the retail market in the last 10 years with fully digital payments, nobody would have expected that to be so successful. Now that same disruption is happening in the SME market, and we want the millions of SMEs across Europe to see that by using our solution – financial transactions will never be a barrier again.”

Helping SMEs compete in the big leagues

Founded in 2015 in Zürich, Switzerland, Amnis WebApp was created to offer SME finance managers access to simple, low-fee monetary transfers, and help prevent financial transactions from being a barrier to even the smallest businesses. 

“We offer everything traditional banks are offering, but we also offer local payment rails so that an SME can make competitive payments to Australia, Brazil or wherever,” says Wuest. “We also offer a great suite of exchange currencies so our customers can receive and pay invoices more easily, and soon we’re also launching our collect feature that will provide virtual accounts to SMEs so that they don’t even need a bank account to handle foreign currencies.

“What makes us different is that we don’t think in terms of contracts like a bank,” he adds. “We just look at what financial needs an SME has and build our product to fulfill those needs. That way, nobody has to be an expert in financial transactions to use our WebApp as it’s all integrated into the customer experience.”

The Amnis WebApp quickly became a favorite money transfer platform for SMEs in Switzerland, helping the company grow rapidly year-on-year. By 2020, Amnis was serving 1,300 business customers, with a foreign exchange and international payments turnover of more than half a billion Euro. 

This success prompted the startup to set its sights set on expansion into the rest of Europe. But with its WebApp built around shared hosting, Amnis first needed to rethink its IT infrastructure to handle any influx of new customers as well as comply with additional EU financial regulations. Leading Amnis to investigate creating a new scalable cloud architecture in Azure.

Building a scalable and cost-effective cloud solution

“Before we moved to Azure our setup was relatively basic. Just a single database server with no console access and everything uploaded through FTP,” explains András Ratz, CTO at Amnis. 

“We needed to be much more hands-on with our platform, be able to spot problems and fix them and also run our own simple virtual machines to test and implement new services – something rarely possible with shared hosting providers.

“With Azure, we now have an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that houses our database storage alongside two Kubernetes clusters,” he says. “One as a testing environment and the other for production – giving us clear visibility over what’s happening at all times.” 

Amnis’s new cloud architecture also provides the scalability it needs to manage any additional users in a cost-effective way. Automatically scaling up and down depending on factors such as the day of the week or time of day to meet customer usage demands.

“By expanding into Europe we expect to have much more traffic, so naturally the system has to be able to serve these requests,” says Ratz. “We now have two main instances that spin up additional virtual machines in the morning and at the end of the day. Outside of those times, those extra resources are just thrown away, making it much more cost effective than scaling up on demand each day.

“This setup also gives us more stability which is really important,” he adds. “If one of the virtual machines dies over the weekend, we have no outages because the whole Kubernetes environment just spins a new one up to take care of it, and we only realize there was a problem if we check back in the logs.”

Meeting the business challenges of a new market

With help from the Microsoft ISV and Digital Native Center of Excellence team, Amnis was able to get its new Azure infrastructure up and running without delay. As a member of the Microsoft for Startups program, the company also had access to a dedicated technical and business support system built for early-stage businesses – giving Amnis the tools it needed to meet its ambitious growth plans and begin servicing SMEs across Europe. 

“Migrating to Azure was the best possible way we could continue to scale at our current pace,” says Wuest. “Thanks to the Microsoft ISV and Startups teams, we always had direct contact with the right people needed for each stage of implementation, which helped speed up discussions and guide our developers through this new cloud environment.”

As a regulated payment institution in the EU, Amnis must comply with the Payment Services Act and prove to the Financial Market Authority that its IT architecture and data storage is fully compliant. But with the help of Microsoft, meeting these regulations hasn’t been the barrier it could have been. “By partnering with Microsoft, we had all the necessary paperwork to help us smooth this process with the regulatory body, which really helped take the pressure off our compliance team and keep our EU expansion on track.”

Since it first launched in 2015, Amnis has proudly been a disruptor in the Swiss financial market and plans to use its new cloud architecture to continue giving SMEs a foot-up to compete with the big players across Europe.

“There are a lot of topics in the financial industry that haven’t changed for the last 20 years, which is a huge opportunity for us as banks are not very flexible when it comes to IT strategy,” says Wuest. 

“Look at international payments for example, there is no other solution currently on the market where SMEs can connect with their supply chain. That's a service we already offer in Switzerland, and through Azure cloud we can start rolling it out in Europe along with any new features or updates in the coming months. Something a larger company with an outdated architecture might struggle to do in the same time frame.” 

Empowering SMEs now and in the future

As Amnis begins its European launch with nine planned countries by the end of 2021, it’s hard for Wuest to imagine how far his company has come in just six short years. “Not long ago we were  just a small team trying to get a foot in the Swiss market. Now we’re expanding into Europe, and I believe Microsoft enabled us to bring a lot of things together,” he says. 

“Azure has given us the flexibility to meet customer demand, as well as easily onboard new solutions and themes in an efficient manner. 

With SMEs and larger companies alike all adapting to a more integrated world, Amnis sees working in the cloud as an absolute necessity and plans to use its new architecture to further automate more processes and make it easier for clients to use its WebApp.

“It’s important to look at how the financial industry is changing and what SMEs now need from their banking provider to succeed,” Wuest says in summary. 

“In the European market, we’re talking about 23 million SMEs, and by adding automations wherever possible we can help empower these businesses to connect with our solution and get their whole banking suite in one place. With our new infrastructure, in my opinion, that is now only three to five years ahead of us.”