How a global payments operator reduced campaign launch time to minutes

Background:

The Opportunity: A Checkout Network Built to Become an Ad Network

A leading fintech operator based in the US runs one of the world's largest digital checkout networks. Behind it: a rich first-party transaction graph, a targetable audience of 350M, and a long tail of small and medium merchants selling through its payment rails. That combination made advertising the obvious next business line, merchants as both publisher and advertiser, at payments-company scale.

Challenge:

The Wall: A Manual Process That Couldn't Scale

The platform's first ad-serving vendor got the business off the ground. Scaling it is what exposed the limits in how that vendor's platform was built.

Launching a single campaign meant a manual relay across three internal teams and two systems: a brief, a hand-built audience segment (up to two days of manual data handovers and SQL queries alone), a rebuilt campaign in the vendor's console. Depending on the audience, that took a week to a week and a half. Every time.

No self-serve way to compose audiences from the platform's own data. No format flexibility without an engineering ticket. No payments layer for the SMB long tail to activate spend at all.

The bottleneck: three teams, two systems, standing between every brief and every live campaign.

Solution: The Osmos Approach: Self-Serve, Speed, and Scale

Osmos gave the platform one self-serve portal for its ad business, built on real-time data, format speed, SMB activation, and proven scale.

• A self-serve portal, start to finish. Advertisers plan, launch, and manage campaigns in one place. No more relay across teams and systems.
• Real-time audience data. Click and impression events stream into a cloud data warehouse in real time and refresh hourly. The full audience rebuild syncs every 24 hours. No more manual SQL, no more data handovers.
• Composable ad formats. New creative formats ship same-day. No engineering ticket per variant.
• A dedicated wallet for SMB activation. A productized wallet lets long-tail merchants fund and manage spend directly. That was the missing piece.
• Custom integrations. Direct integrations with a checkout-experience partner and two major e-commerce platform SDKs, wired straight into the portal.
• Proven scale. A live load test on the display-ad path: 4,500 queries per second, sustained for 30 minutes.

Impact:

The Result: Weeks Collapsed to Minutes

• Campaign launch time: 1–1.5 weeks to within minutes.
  One self-serve screen replaced a multi-team relay.
• 19.2ms average p99 latency at 4,500 queries per second,
  measured by the platform's own engineers in live load testing.
• An SMB ad network, composed within months
  built on existing infrastructure instead of a ground-up rebuild.

The platform now runs its ad business through one self-serve portal, on infrastructure built for its own scale: live data underneath it, fast enough for real-time decisioning, and extensible enough to keep shipping new formats as it grows.