From Fragmented to Unified: Lopay Reduces Data Costs 40% with Matia ETL & Reverse ETL

Company: Lopay
Location: London
Industry: Fintech - Payment Processing
Solutions: Matia ETL, Matia Reverse ETL
Website: lopay.com

The Data Stack:

• Ingestion & Reverse ETL: Matia
• Warehouse: Snowflake
• Transformation: dbt Cloud
• BI Tool: Metabase
• Connectors Used: PostgreSQL, Stripe, Salesforce, Intercom, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Xero, Google Play, Apple App Store

The Company

Lopay provides comprehensive payment solutions for small businesses across the UK and US., Lopay offers both in-person and remote payment processing through card terminals, tap-on-phone and payment links.

Beyond basic payment processing, Lopay delivers value-added services including instant payouts, cash advances, and loyalty rewards programs—all designed to help small merchants manage their business finances more efficiently.

Steve Callery, Chief Data Officer and part of Lopay's founding team, manages the entire data infrastructure, from data engineering and warehousing to all financial operations. Without a dedicated data team, efficiency and the right tools are critical to Lopay's ability to scale.

"Moving from two tools to one platform wasn't just about cost savings, though 40% is nothing to sneeze at. It was about having a single source of truth for data movement, where everything just works. No more context-switching, just straight results."

The Challenge

For years, Lopay relied on a legacy ETL player for data ingestion and a separate tool for reverse ETL. Cost pressures mounted year after year as the vendor increased pricing with each contract renewal.

As Lopay's data needs grew, so did the complexity:

• Rising costs: Annual price increases from their legacy ETL provider made renewal decisions increasingly difficult
• Fragmented workflow: Managing data movement across two separate platforms created unnecessary complexity for a one-person team
• Limited scalability: As the sole data engineer managing both ETL and reverse ETL, Steve needed a unified solution that could grow with the business without requiring additional headcount

Additionally, they were experiencing inconsistent support with their previous ETL solution.  The breaking point came when Lopay's two-year unlimited consumption contract expired, and projected costs for separate ETL and reverse ETL solutions would spike significantly.

Lopay was hesitant to migrate due to the significant volume of connectors on the legacy ETL tool and the assumed complexity and timeline surrounding this. 

The Solution

Matia offered a single platform for both ETL and reverse ETL, with key capabilities including:

• Unified Data Movement: One platform to handle both ingestion from critical sources (production database, Stripe) and activation to operational tools (Salesforce, Intercom, Google Sheets)
• Fast Migrations: Seamless migration support and clean, backward compatible schemas with legacy ETL tools made migrations seamless.
• Reliable Stripe Integration: As a payment processing business deeply integrated with Stripe, reliable syncs of Stripe data to Snowflake were mission-critical, Matia delivered flawlessly
• Responsive Support: The Matia team provided direct, honest answers without sales "guff" and resolved issues, often user errors, within hours
• Future-Ready Capabilities: Built-in data catalog and end-to-end lineage capabilities positioned Lopay for team expansion without additional tooling

"It's a dream to have Matia as a one stop solution now where I can just go in, I can just do all the data movement in one place with no issues." - Steve Callery, Chief Data Officer, Lopay

The Impact

Since consolidating onto Matia, Lopay has achieved measurable improvements:

• ‍40% Total Cost Reduction: By replacing two separate tools with Matia's unified platform, Lopay reduced their overall data movement costs by an estimated 40%.
• ‍10% Lower Snowflake Costs: Optimized data ingestion resulted in approximately 10% reduction in Snowflake warehouse costs, even as data volumes increased‍
• Efficient GTM Operations: Sales teams now receive up-to-date merchant trading data in Salesforce to support upselling and reactivation efforts; support teams access critical customer context in Intercom. Matia also provided better  anomaly alerting, to help things run smoothly, compared to their previous reverse ETL solution‍
• 100 integrations Migrated with Zero Downtime: The proof of concept and migration process worked exactly as promised, with no surprises or hidden limitations. Matia migrated 100 + integrations across 15 different connectors in a few days time. ‍
• Rapid Development Velocity: When Lopay needed specific features before going live, Matia delivered them in days or weeks, not months

"The speed of development's been very impressive... [features] that I needed before go live, they've just gone away and smashed those out in days or weeks." - Steve Callery, Chief Data Officer, Lopay

Looking Ahead

As Lopay prepares to expand Steve's team in 2026, Matia's data catalog and lineage features will become increasingly valuable. These capabilities will help new team members understand data dependencies and downstream impacts, knowledge that currently dispersed across various documents.

The partnership approach Matia has taken gives Steve confidence that as Lopay's needs evolve, the platform will evolve with them. For a lean fintech team competing against industry giants, that reliability and responsiveness makes all the difference.