Transforming Payments: A journey to meet customer demand and stay competitive

Our client is one of the UK’s leading payment processing services, providing its customers with a payment gateway for online, card, and over-the-phone payments. With a customer-first approach, it is no surprise that it is the highest-rated payment provider on Trustpilot and prides itself on having stellar customer service.

In recent years, the digital payments market has evolved rapidly, with customer demand driving the product roadmaps of most businesses. An example of this in the payment provider space is mobile payments- nowadays an absolute must-have for most end-customers and critical for our client to remain competitive and meet market demand. As such, our client has partnered with esynergy to expedite two key projects: the integration of its payment gateway and tokenization, with the core objective to minimize the risk of losing vendors and market share to competitors.

With strong collaboration and utmost transparency across the team, the Apple Pay API was successfully integrated into our client’s payment gateway with best-of-breed software engineering practices executed on the cloud, including:

• Demonstrating a commitment to Agile methodologies, the design was rapidly and effectively rolled out through iterative delivery and continuous feedback loops. Transparent progress updates and regular retrospectives on the architecture process facilitated a dynamic and responsive project timeline
• Implementing APIs as microservices (using Java) to deploy and scale faster
• Introducing SOLID principles to reduce code dependencies, which makes the code easier to understand, maintain, and change
• Introducing automation by utilizing infrastructure-as-code
• Implementing test-driven development and continuous integration pipelines, including unit, component, and end-to-end system testing
• Utilizing proven open-source technologies such as K8S on AWS
• Modernizing the existing technology stack, including Java 17 upgrades and open-source queueing technology (Active MQ) to improve the existing platform and integrate new functions

Value Adds:

By making fundamental changes to their payment gateway to enable mobile payment integration, our client can now leverage the standardized process for integrating other mobile wallets such as Amazon Pay and Google Pay. These can be added quickly and efficiently by reusing code and adding even more reasons for our client’s vendors to remain loyal by staying ahead of their competition. The integration of Google Pay has already begun, and the team is currently on course to achieve full integration by Spring 2024.

During the process of the Apple Pay integration, our client started working with Visa and MasterCard to integrate their tokenization. esynergy’s scope was extended to also support this engagement, which went live even before the Apple Pay integration. As the first project to deploy into production, it allowed the team to use synergies and leverage the work from the Apple Pay integration around agile best practices and delivery principles.

Tokenization has allowed our client to replace sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, with unique tokens that have no intrinsic value or meaning. These tokens are used as placeholders for the client’s sensitive data and are now managed by Visa and MasterCard’s card scheme services.

Further value has been realized as a result of the tokenization integration including:

• Enhanced security by reducing the exposure of sensitive client data
• Mitigating the risk of a data breach impact has reduced the risk of financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities
• Improved customer trust by implementing robust security measures, as they are aware their sensitive data is being protected more efficiently
• Introducing token event notifications from the card scheme providers has enabled visibility on card renewals, cancelations, and revokes
• Visibility of PAN status availability has resulted in increased authorization rates
• ActiveMQ has enabled our client to separate certain processes that were previously run synchronously. Enabling the platform to scale and have more throughput, resulting in future authorizations and cost savings