PhonePe, one of India's largest digital payment platforms, processes over 360 million transactions daily and faces the challenge of maintaining reliability, governance, and cost efficiency at scale. At the Aerospike Bangalore Summit, Koushik Ramachandra, a software architect at PhonePe, detailed how Aerospike's database technology evolved to become integral to PhonePe's governance and compliance architecture. By embedding governance directly into the data layer, PhonePe avoided complex middleware and ensured data isolation, role-based access controls, and compliance with regulatory standards across its vast infrastructure. Aerospike's predictable performance supports PhonePe's need for real-time responsiveness and robust data governance, enabling sub-millisecond read latencies and consistent performance across its three data centers. This architecture supports various use cases, from fraud detection to real-time analytics, while ensuring data integrity and reliability. PhonePe's experience highlights the importance of integrating governance within the data architecture, prioritizing predictable performance over peak capabilities, and maintaining a unified system to manage the complexities of large-scale financial operations.