TNG Digital is one of Malaysia’s leading fintech companies and the operator of TNG eWallet, TNG eWallet started as a digital payment solution for everyday transactions, particularly offline QR payments across transport, retail and small merchants. Today, it has evolved into a comprehensive financial and lifestyle platform that integrates payments, financial services and everyday services within a single trusted app. Since 2018, its user base has grown more than tenfold. By 2025, TNG Digital was serving 25 million verified users in a country of 33 million people, making its platform a critical part of the region’s digital payment infrastructure.

As the business scaled, the demands on its data foundation increased sharply. TNG Digital needed a database platform that could support high-concurrency payment traffic, minimize operational risk during frequent changes, and provide a consistent experience across cloud environments. By migrating its core payment data to OceanBase, TNG Digital transitioned from a "downtime crisis" to 99.99% high availability, achieving a 40% boost in throughput and a 5x reduction in storage costs.

The Challenge

TNG Digital's user base grew more than 10x since 2018, and the MySQL-based database underpinning its payment platform could not keep pace. The cracks showed in four critical areas:

• Traffic spikes overwhelmed the system. Regular midday payment peaks were manageable, but sudden surges — such as government subsidy disbursements reaching millions of users simultaneously — overwhelmed the existing MySQL architecture. Six years ago, a data anomaly during one such event was traced directly to a bottleneck in the database layer, where server resources were underutilized yet throughput hit a ceiling.
• Schema changes caused outages. TNG Digital needed frequent DDL operations to iterate on payment features. Each DDL change on the existing MySQL setup risked production downtime, forcing the team to choose between shipping features and maintaining uptime.
• Multi-cloud expansion hit a wall. Starting on Alibaba Cloud, TNG Digital expanded to Azure and AWS as it scaled. But the MySQL deployment could not deliver a consistent operational experience across cloud providers, creating vendor lock-in risk and slowing regional expansion.
• Costs climbed while performance stalled. Explosive data growth drove up storage and infrastructure costs, while throughput on the same hardware could not keep up with transaction volumes — a cycle CTO Leslie Lip described as being caught in a "scalability trap" despite 2–3x annual business growth.

"Behind the growth numbers was a constant battle," Lip said. "We needed a data foundation that could absorb shocks, not just handle steady-state traffic."

The Solution

OceanBase's native distributed architecture addressed each of TNG Digital's pain points through a deployment designed for payment-grade reliability across multiple cloud environments:

• Zero-downtime DDL validated under production-level load
  During the proof-of-concept phase, OceanBase executed schema changes — the same DDL operations that previously caused outages — under a sustained load of 40,000 TPS with zero service interruption and zero performance degradation. This eliminated the trade-off between feature velocity and system stability.
• Elastic scalability absorbed traffic shocks.
  OceanBase's share-nothing distributed architecture provided linear scalability, allowing TNG Digital to expand capacity on demand without application-level changes. This addressed both routine peak traffic and unpredictable surges from government disbursement events.
• Unified multi-cloud operations removed vendor lock-in.
  OceanBase's built-in compatibility layer delivered a consistent deployment and operations experience across Alibaba Cloud, Azure, and AWS — consistent performance, compliance auditing, and operational workflows regardless of the underlying provider.
• 5x compression and 40% throughput gain broke the cost-performance stalemate.
  OceanBase's LSM-tree-based compression engine reduced data volume by 5x, cutting storage costs significantly. Its distributed execution engine achieved a 40% throughput improvement on identical hardware specifications.
• Full MySQL compatibility shortened the migration cycle.
  Compatibility in syntax, drivers, and application behavior meant TNG Digital's engineering team required no retraining, dramatically compressing implementation timelines.

“OceanBase is not just a database, but a technical platform that can grow with the company's ambitions.”

Leslie Lip

CTO at TNG Digital

The Results

Since deploying OceanBase, TNG Digital's core payment platform has seen measurable improvements across reliability, performance, and operational agility:

• 99.99% availability, zero database incidents. A step change from a history that included outage risk during every major traffic event. The platform now handles government subsidy disbursements and seasonal payment peaks without operational concern.
• 40% throughput increase on the same hardware. TNG Digital processes significantly more transactions without additional infrastructure investment. Combined with 5x data compression, the economics of the data layer shifted from a cost center to an enabler of profitability.
• Faster iteration, broader reach. Zero-downtime DDL and consistent multi-cloud operations mean the product and engineering teams ship payment features without scheduling maintenance windows or worrying about cross-cloud inconsistencies.

Looking Ahead

For fast-scaling fintech companies, the data foundation must do more than store transactions. It must withstand sudden traffic spikes, support continuous change, and scale across environments without driving up operational complexity.

TNG Digital’s adoption of OceanBase shows how a distributed database can meet these requirements in production payment scenarios. By aligning technical capabilities such as zero-downtime operations, distributed scalability, MySQL compatibility, and multi-cloud consistency with real business needs, the partnership has created a stronger foundation for both resilience and growth.

Looking ahead, TNG Digital and OceanBase have begun collaborating on key-value database model construction and cross-cloud active-active architecture — capabilities aimed at building lower-latency, more resilient payment applications as TNG Digital expands across Southeast Asia.