Building a highly scalable payment gateway

Our client, one of the world’s largest global payment processing companies, was managing 12 payment gateways most of which were added due to acquisitions or developments for specific needs of customers. Those platforms all serve different audiences, needs and underlying technologies and thus added significant complexity to the management of the gateways.

The business wanted to introduce one single, overarching interface that would consolidate the 12 payment gateways and allow a streamlined access and management. The requirement on the platform was that it was cloud-based, scalable and highly available.

esynergy partnered with the organisation to design and build a highly-scalable and resilient payment gateway platform on AWS on a modern language with high code quality tooling and processes, reducing cost and time to get insights for additional use cases and maintaining the highest quality standards.

esynergy added value to the programme in multiple ways. An initial pain point for the client was knowledge on the cutting edge technologies (mainly Scala/Akka) they had chosen to build the new gateway on. The esynergy team followed its usual dual delivery and upskill model, working to uplift/upskill internal capabilities and knowledge around DevOps on the platform, while delivering an enterprise grade solution. esynergy introduced various technologies and techniques such as Terraform, Cassandra, and Canary Deployments. Furthermore, we increased the velocity of development to get the release to the clients customers quicker.

The client is now able to run the first fully containerised application in the AWS cloud in a highly scalable manner, with multiple deployments per day without affecting live traffic or causing downtime. One of the first applications delivered in this setup enabled a legacy gateway technology to outsource the verification of idempotent transactions to a microservice, which enabled delivering this feature in production grade within three months and therefore taking on a significant number of transactions from an existing US tech client, which demanded that feature for upscaling their volume.

The modern RESTful API attracts new customers as well as invites existing customers to switch to the new service beside the operational improvements. Due to the success of the first stage of this project more services beside payments have been implemented in the new gateway as micro services and improve experience for the customer and higher conversion rates.