Envisso uses data to turn the management of merchant risk into a profit driver. Their AI-powered monitoring platform and first-of-its-kind payments insurance solution enable partners to process transactions confidently and securely, providing efficiency and peace of mind to both payment companies and merchants. But in today’s payments landscape, where global scale increases both opportunity and exposure, Envisso’s legacy infrastructure was slowing the company down. Siloed data, limited visibility into lineage and manual processes made it harder to deliver instant risk intelligence. In an environment that requires speed and precision, Envisso needed a platform that could ingest and analyze vast amounts of merchant, transaction and dispute data — while keeping governance and security intact. Turning to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Envisso now has a unified foundation for data, analytics and AI to mitigate merchant risk more efficiently and accelerate growth.
When growth outpaces technology
Envisso was still young, but already they were experiencing the pains that come from rapid growth. As an insurer and risk-mitigation partner for payment platforms, their business model depends on turning massive amounts of merchant, transaction and dispute data into actionable risk insights. But early on, data fragmentation and varied processing needs created challenges. Struggles with data lineage made data governance more challenging, requiring manual management. Limited visibility into pipeline failures meant that data insights weren’t making it to the customer, while manual management of separate data resources further added to the labor-intensive work.
As Envisso’s growth accelerated, the limitations of their legacy infrastructure became more apparent. A more varied client base introduced multiple data environments, creating a labor-intensive process while maintaining secure access across platforms like S3 and RDS. Provisioning infrastructure and pipelines for new clients often introduced bottlenecks, delaying time to value.
“Looking at the challenges we were facing, we knew modernizing our technology stack would help us operate more efficiently, which is key to helping us meet the growing demands of our customers,” Matthew Choy, Head of Engineering at Envisso, explained.
The power of unified data to mitigate merchant risk
Scaling globally while maintaining governance, security and speed would require a unified data approach. With Databricks, Envisso introduced a single source of truth for data, bringing analysts, PMs and product engineers into the same platform as the data engineers.
Databricks helped Envisso unify data across their client roster using Unity Catalog, ensuring secure and centralized access control. With Lakeflow Jobs, they gained the ability to ingest and enrich merchant data from 30-plus payment providers and serve actionable insights into potential risks. Mosaic AI made it possible to quickly experiment with different external models, while ai_query() integration allowed teams to embed LLMs directly into production SQL workflows.
“Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has been transformative for Envisso. Everything we need is either available or on the roadmap,” Matthew said.
As a fully managed platform, Databricks let Envisso replace manual Excel exports and siloed workflows with interactive notebooks that foster collaboration across data teams, dashboards that visualize insights for both internal teams and customers to act on and unified governance to ensure all sensitive data is secure and protected. Delta Sharing and Delta Lake help Envisso share live data securely across partners, clouds and regions. And they built a custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) to securely connect AI agents directly to their data. Now, even nontechnical teams can validate data changes, triage pipeline issues or run exploratory analyses — all under Unity Catalog’s fine-grained governance.
Accelerating growth without boundaries
By standardizing on Databricks, Envisso can stay lean and nimble without sacrificing their growth or core business. Reducing onboarding from weeks to a single day is helping merchants begin making sales faster. Rapid scalability has enabled Envisso to expand from Asia into Europe, Latin America and beyond.
Crucially, Envisso avoided doubling their engineering team, maintaining a lean ~15-person organization while supporting a growing global customer base. Business teams and leadership now enjoy autonomy to answer ad hoc risk questions without waiting on the data team, while data engineers focus on innovation and scale.
“Data and AI are the cornerstones of our business, and leveraging the Databricks system will enable us to grow the value we see from these elements,” Matthew said.