TNG Digital selects OceanBase to power core Payment data in southeast Asia

As a frontrunner in Malaysia's FinTech sector, TNG Digital has deeply integrated its TNG eWallet into the daily payment lives of millions, comprehensively covering high-frequency scenarios like transportation, dining, and money transfers. Since 2018, its user base has grown explosively by over 10-fold. By 2025, it serves 25 million verified users out of Malaysia's 33 million population, establishing itself as a critical information infrastructure supporting the regional digital economy and crucial public services.

However, rapid growth brought a technical "make-or-break test." Leveraging its core technical strengths—native distribution, zero-downtime operations, and full-stack multi-cloud compatibility—OceanBase precisely solved TNG Digital’s pain points regarding high-concurrency support and business continuity. This collaboration facilitated a leapfrog upgrade, transitioning the company from a "downtime crisis" to "99.99% high availability."

This partnership not only provides the technical cornerstone for TNG Digital's scalable profitability but also sets a benchmark for how distributed database technology can empower a leading Southeast Asian FinTech's core payment scenarios. It offers a new practical path for foundational distributed database software to expand globally, combining "technical adaptation with low-cost implementation."

Growing Pains: Data Foundation Shortcomings in High-Concurrency FinTech

As the core platform carrying daily payments for tens of millions of users in Malaysia, TNG Digital's system stability directly impacts user experience and financial market order. Leslie Lip, TNG Digital's CTO, admitted that behind the 2-3x annual business growth was a constant battle against the "scalability trap." The core pain points centered on four shortcomings in their data foundation:

1. Failure to Cope with Sudden Traffic Peaks:

During peak payment times, such as the midday rush, the entire eWallet system bears immense transaction pressure. The original database struggled to support non-conventional, sudden traffic surges, such as government subsidy disbursements. A data anomaly TNG Digital experienced six years ago was directly traced to a flaw in the original database architecture, where server resources were bottlenecked despite underutilization, exposing the core data foundation's lack of "impact resistance."

2. Downtime Risk During Business Iteration:

FinTech platforms require frequent table schema updates (DDL changes) to adapt to payment innovation. However, DDL changes in the original database often led to production environment downtime, directly affecting the continuity of core operations like payments and transfers, becoming a "stumbling block" to rapid business iteration.

3. Compatibility Barriers to Multi-Cloud Expansion:

Initially relying on Alibaba Cloud, TNG Digital expanded its reach to Azure and AWS as its scale grew. However, database services across different cloud vendors created an adaptation gap, preventing cross-cloud collaborative O&M and exposing the company to "vendor lock-in" risk, which constrained TNG Digital's global expansion pace.

4. Performance and Cost Imbalance:

User growth resulted in explosive data accumulation. The original database's low storage efficiency led to continuously rising IDC O&M and storage costs. Simultaneously, throughput, even on the same hardware specifications, could not keep pace with business demand, creating a vicious cycle of "rising costs and stagnant performance."

OceanBase’s Solution: "Payment-Grade" Capability Meets Core FinTech Needs

Leslie Lip emphasized that the core rationale for choosing OceanBase was "solving real business pain points, not merely chasing technical parameter upgrades." OceanBase provided a full-stack solution tailored for FinTech's characteristics, addressing TNG Digital's core demands for high concurrency, business continuity, and multi-cloud scalability:

1. Zero-Downtime DDL Solves Iteration Challenges:

Leveraging its native distributed architecture, OceanBase achieved a critical technical breakthrough: zero-downtime execution of core table DDL operations. During the Proof of Concept (POC) phase, DDL tests were completed under a concurrent scenario of 40,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS) CRUD operations, with zero service interruption and zero performance degradation. This feature completely eliminated the downtime risk during TNG Digital's high-frequency iteration, clearing a major technical obstacle for rapid payment innovation.

2. Native Distributed Architecture Withstands Peak Pressure:

OceanBase adopts a "share-nothing" native distributed architecture with linear elastic scalability, allowing for on-demand capacity expansion to support business growth. This capability not only easily handles regular midday peak traffic but also absorbs the shock of non-conventional surges like government subsidy disbursements, fundamentally eliminating downtime risk and perfectly matching the extreme high-availability requirements of payment scenarios.

3. Full-Stack Multi-Cloud Consistency Experience:

OceanBase features a built-in multi-cloud compatibility module, offering a unified technical interface and adaptation layer that seamlessly works with the underlying environments of Alibaba Cloud, Azure, and AWS. This ensures end-to-end consistency in deployment architecture, O&M operations, performance, and compliance auditing across different cloud platforms.

4. High Compression Ratio + High-Performance Optimization Boosts Efficiency:

OceanBase’s high-compression data engine achieves a 5x reduction in data volume, significantly lowering storage and O&M costs. Furthermore, its distributed execution engine optimization delivered a 40% throughput increase on the same hardware specifications, precisely solving TNG Digital’s dilemma of "rising costs and stagnant performance" and providing technical support for the FinTech firm’s path to profitability.

5. Full MySQL Compatibility Accelerates Implementation:

OceanBase’s deep-tuned MySQL compatibility layer ensures full compatibility in syntax, application behavior, and drivers. This key feature allowed the TNG Digital team to quickly adapt with zero additional learning costs, dramatically shortening the project migration and implementation cycle, and ensuring a "smooth transition" for the technology upgrade. As Leslie Lip stated, OceanBase is not just a database, but a "technical platform that can grow with the company's ambitions."

Value Leap: From "Survival Line" to "Growth Line"

After upgrading its core data foundation with OceanBase, TNG Digital achieved a qualitative leap in business stability, operational efficiency, and innovation capability, with key results perfectly matching the core demands of the FinTech payment scenario:

1. Payment Continuity Reaches Industry Top-Tier:

The core system achieved 99.99% high availability. Since partnering with OceanBase, no database incidents have occurred. It successfully supported the stable operation of multiple critical events, such as government subsidy disbursements, completely shedding the past shadow of downtime and solidifying the payment business's "survival line."

2. Dual Breakthrough in Performance and Cost Efficiency:

Business throughput increased by 40% on the same hardware specifications, efficiently handling high-concurrency transactions during peak periods. The 5x data compression ratio significantly reduced storage costs, strongly supporting the company’s path to profitability and transforming the data foundation from a "cost center" to a "profit center."

3. Innovation and Expansion Capabilities Fully Unleashed:

Zero-downtime DDL and multi-cloud compatibility removed obstacles for TNG Digital's scenario iteration and cross-platform expansion. The two parties have already initiated plans for key-value database model construction and cross-cloud active-active architecture collaboration, aiming to build more resilient, time-sensitive payment applications based on OceanBase and further widen the boundaries of business growth.

From a Domestic Payment-Supporting Distributed Database to a Global Payment-Supporting Distributed Database

The scalable growth of FinTech is fundamentally a comprehensive test of the data foundation’s "impact resistance, iteration capability, and scalability." As a leader in Southeast Asian payments, TNG Digital's pain points—"high concurrency, zero interruption, and multi-cloud expansion"—are common challenges faced by FinTech companies globally during scaling. OceanBase's successful enablement not only solved a single enterprise's technical difficulties but also provided a replicable technical solution tailored to the core needs of payment scenarios.

The collaboration between OceanBase and TNG Digital marks the mature capability of a distributed database, underpinned by hard-core features like "native distribution + zero downtime + full-stack multi-cloud compatibility," to support core payment scenarios for leading overseas FinTech firms. It is a critical cross-over from "domestic core scenario validation" to "overseas high-frequency payment scenario implementation."

The core highlight of this partnership is the precise matching of technical features to payment scenario demands: zero-downtime ensures business iteration continuity; native distribution supports high-concurrency peaks; and multi-cloud compatibility breaks expansion barriers. Together, these advantages reshape the overseas market's technical perception of distributed database foundational software in payment environments.

Moving forward, OceanBase will continue to deepen synergistic innovation with TNG Digital, assisting its strategic goals like cloud service provider expansion and cross-cloud resilience upgrades. Furthermore, using this collaboration as a blueprint, it will refine its localized service system in the Southeast Asian market, focusing on core scenarios like FinTech payment and digital wallets, providing stable, efficient, and cost-effective "payment-grade" data foundation support for more international enterprises, and advancing the globalization of distributed database foundational software into a new phase of "deep scenario-based empowerment."