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How We Settle Millions Of Payment Transactions At Norwegian Air Shuttle
This presentation explores how Norwegian Air Shuttle — Norway's largest airline and one of the largest low-cost carriers in Europe — developed a custom settlement system to process millions of payment transactions using AWS serverless technologies.
Airline Payments
Millions of transactions
AWS Serverless
Lambda, S3, DynamoDB
Settlement
Reconciliation & analysis
What You'll Learn
A comprehensive look at building enterprise-grade payment settlement systems using modern cloud architecture.
Norwegian Air Shuttle AS
Norwegian is a leading airline in Scandinavia and one of the largest low-cost carriers in Europe. The company has a dedicated payment team that is very ambitious about payment innovation.
The team is eager to adopt new technology and try out new payment methods to boost revenues and improve customer experience. Settlement is a key part of the payment flow, and Norwegian has built a custom settlement system in-house.
Norwegian Air
Leading Low-Cost Carrier
Payment 101: The Four Party Model
Understanding the payment flow is essential before diving into settlement systems. A typical card payment involves several entities working together.
Card Holder
Customer
Merchant
Norwegian
Acquirer
Acquiring Bank
Card Schemes
Visa, Mastercard
Issuer
Card Issuing Bank
Acquiring Bank
The financial institution that maintains the merchant account. Connected to card schemes to enable card transactions and ensure merchants have necessary facilities.
Card Schemes
Visa, Mastercard, etc. facilitate communication between acquirer and issuer. Think of them as infrastructure for card payments.
What Are Settlement Systems?
After the payment process, acquirers send settlement information to the merchant about all payments they have acquired. The settlement system verifies all transactions and total amounts for accounting, revenue tracking, tax reporting, and compliance — enabling reliable, auditable financial workflows.
Why Do We Need Settlement Systems?
Transparency
Easily track transaction status and revenue across all markets. Full visibility into cash-processing and settlement workflows.
Compliance & Risk
Mitigate counterparty risk with auditable financial workflows. Ensure tax reporting and regulatory compliance.
Data Insights
Settlement data enables payment-fee analytics, revenue tracking, and business intelligence at scale.
Technical Architecture
Building scalable backend and data systems to handle millions of daily transactions. The architecture uses modular platform components on AWS serverless for reliability and operational best practices.
Payment Event Listener
Lambda function receives payment events and creates records in DynamoDB with UUID, SalesId, Currency, Amount, CardType, CardScheme.
Settlement File Ingestion
Acquirers deliver settlement info via API (fetched by Lambda cron jobs) or SFTP (AWS Transfer). Files stored in S3 buckets in JSON, CSV, or XML format.
Settlement Processors
When files land in S3, Lambda processors parse transactions, match with database records, and store results as "unsettled batches".
Bank Message Processing
ISO standard XML bank messages arrive via SFTP with information about money flowing into the account. Each payout saved as intermediate transactions.
Intermediate Transaction Processor
Every 3 hours, Lambda compares unsettled batches with intermediate transactions, matches using unique references, verifies totals, and creates "settled batches" for SAP.
Data & Analytics
Settlement data powers revenue tracking, payment-fee analytics, and partnership insights across all markets. Tools let Finance teams manage settlement logic independently using AWS Athena, Glue, Redshift, and QuickSight.
Settlement Status
Monitor global settlement status across providers and markets. Identify settled vs. unmatched transactions with auditable financial workflows.
Cash Flow & Revenue
Track cash-processing and revenue flows across partnerships. Understand funds received and support tax reporting requirements.
Payment-Fee Analytics
Fee information embedded per transaction:
- Acquirer fee - charged by acquirer
- Interchange fee - charged by issuer
- Scheme fee - charged by card scheme
Intelligent Payment Routing
Train ML models using historical payment + settlement data to route transactions to acquirers with lowest fees and highest success rates. Factors: card type, scheme, country, currency.
Technology Stack
Core Technologies
Infrastructure
Analytics
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