How Pearster helped Moneris resolve work 13x faster while spending 37% less
A capacity crunch met a smaller, more senior team. Over two years, seven Pearster engineers reshaped how one of Canada's largest payment processors runs its core cloud operations.
The partnership
Pearster has worked alongside Moneris, one of Canada's largest payment processors, since 2022. What began as a handful of early placements turned into a standing team of Pearsterians embedded across the organization. The engineers who learned the environment at the start are, for the most part, the same ones running it today.
For an operation where downtime is measured in real money, that continuity is the whole point.
The challenge
Inside that wider relationship sat the Core & Cloud function, and it had hit a wall. Demand was outpacing what the group could absorb. Ownership was spread across too many hands, which slowed decisions and blurred accountability.
A routine production change could take close to two weeks to go from request to live. Costs were climbing just to keep pace, and every peak season carried the quiet risk that something would break at the worst possible moment.
What Pearster did
The obvious move would have been to add more people. Pearster did the opposite. We rebuilt the function around a tight team of seven senior engineers who took full ownership, end to end. Pulling the work into fewer, more accountable hands tightened the span of control and removed the coordination drag that had been slowing everything down.
From there the team went after the operating model itself: managing the web application firewall entirely as code, standing up a new multi-region redundancy and disaster recovery capability, and running a series of complex, zero-downtime production migrations. Proactive, alert-driven monitoring replaced firefighting.
The results
13x faster resolution. Average task duration fell from roughly 13 days to under a single day between May 2025 and May 2026.
250+ production changes managed over two years, peaking at 76 in a single month, without one downtime event across two consecutive peak seasons.
80% faster incident response once proactive, alert-driven monitoring was in place.
$400K+ in annual savings from right-sizing cloud infrastructure and retiring redundant enterprise tooling, split roughly evenly between the two.
37% lower headcount cost on the function, proving that fewer, better-placed people can carry more than a larger, thinner group.
The team is very impressive, and the care with which they support Moneris is demonstrable.
Looking ahead
The team is now scoping additional network capabilities and identifying where AI can take routine overhead off people's plates, freeing senior engineers for the work that actually moves the roadmap.