Qombo launches bank‑grade verification at 3,000+ RPS with Upsun

A lean, product-driven fintech ships continuously, without the infrastructure overhead.

Qombo is a Paris-based fintech that provides an API for IBAN and beneficiary-name verification to banks and payment providers across the EU. Its buyers, banks, and regulated payment providers expect 24/7 availability, low latency, and audited controls.

Built by two founders, Qombo set out to prove that a lean team could deliver bank‑grade reliability from day one. The commercial plan hinged on meeting a hard go‑live date for early banking partners while keeping the core team intentionally small.

On the technical side, Qombo runs a Node.js API and a Next.js web app, with Redis for caching. Data persists in both MongoDB and PostgreSQL, and encryption at rest is handled via Vault KMS, a stack chosen for speed, operational simplicity, and bank-grade resilience.

From DIY risk to operational bottleneck

Demand was lumpy and high-stakes; a launch cohort could drive traffic surges of thousands of requests per second with no warm-up window. Every deployment risked interrupting payment‑adjacent workflows, and any outage would erode trust with compliance‑sensitive buyers.

That growth curve exposed an operational truth: DIY infrastructure would dilute focus and force a DevOps hire before revenue. Qombo needed a platform that met compliance, regulation, and EU sovereignty expectations, scaled automatically, and made releases operationally invisible, so product velocity wouldn’t slow under operational load.

Why Upsun: compliance, no‑ops, and a partner mindset

Upsun matched the brief on three fronts. First, compliance posture and EU hosting let Qombo lead with credibility in banking conversations. Second, a no‑ops model, Git‑based workflows, automated pipelines, managed backups, and security hardening meant the team could keep headcount lean. Third, partnership: Ahead of launch, Upsun worked directly with Qombo to validate a zero-downtime rollout approach tailored to a high-throughput API.

"We really wanted to work with OVH behind Upsun, our clients are all Europeans and are very happy with this.", - Arthur Legourd, CEO and Co-founder, Qombo

Implementation on Upsun

Qombo's stateless services and data layer were modeled as code on Upsun, with environments branching from Git. Production ran on OVHcloud in the EU; autoscaling absorbed spikes while guardrails enforced safe deploys. The application layer is Node.js with a Next.js web app; Redis handles caching for hot paths. Data services combine MongoDB for document workloads and PostgreSQL for relational needs, with Vault KMS providing encryption at rest. Together, Qombo and Upsun employed a blue-green deployment style to ensure changes were shipped without interrupting live traffic. Observability and alerts were tuned to surface only what mattered during the first critical weeks.

Impact: continuous delivery without downtime

Within the first release window, Qombo sustained over 3,000 RPS with zero downtime, proving that a two-person team could meet bank-grade expectations without a DevOps function. Deployments became a background task: small, frequent, and uneventful. The credibility of EU sovereignty shortened buyer reviews; the absence of infrastructure toil accelerated roadmap work.

“The most important thing for us was to have a reliable partner doing all the DevOps and infrastructure for us. Not having to hire a person specifically for DevOps is critical.” - Arthur Legourd, CEO and Co‑founder, Qombo.

With the platform layer handled, Qombo’s founders now spend their cycles on customer feedback and product improvements, not fire drills. Zero‑downtime releases turned into a habit, reinforcing confidence with every change.

What’s next: scaling calmly across EU banking

Qombo plans to expand coverage across more European banks and adjacent verification flows while maintaining an intentionally small team.

"We want to keep a small team and keep building, not hiring. DevOps is strategic for us because it saves money and keeps us focused on the product.", - Arthur Legourd, CEO and Co-founder, Qombo. 

With Upsun as the operational backbone, scaling is a planning exercise, not a hiring plan.

For fintech teams wrestling with EU compliance, unpredictable traffic, and limited DevOps capacity, Qombo’s story shows that the right managed platform does more than keep systems running; it turns infrastructure risk into product velocity, zero-downtime releases, and the confidence to scale with customers.