Concardis Develops SmartPay to Reduce Onboarding Times to Under 30 Mins with Endava
THE CHALLENGE
It Always Pays to Improve
As one of Germany’s largest payment companies, Concardis covers some of the DACH market’s biggest merchant accounts along with a variety of the most distinguished small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region. Accordingly, they’re well aware of the technologies and services required to offer fast and secure cashless payment processes for their 120,000+ customers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
In a bid to further improve their services, Concardis wanted to transition away from a time-consuming paper-based onboarding process taking anywhere from one to three weeks. To provide a faster and more efficient solution for SMEs, they needed a reliable partner who could assist them in developing a tailor-made digital product bringing all payment systems and relevant payment processes together on one smart platform.
After a short, minutes-long onboarding process, the solution caters to customers’ payment preferences by giving Concardis’ clients a reliable terminal, the acceptance of cashless, contactless, and mobile payments, as well as the advantages of an online portal and mobile app, in which they can customise and upgrade their packages.
THE SOLUTION
Applying Smart Solutions Right on Time
With Endava’s help, Concardis created SmartPay – an SME-specific product letting merchants manage their business' financial aspects through an intuitive merchant portal, which allows them to view all card transactions for terminals and e-commerce transactions, offers easy access to billing and sales data, supplies comprehensive statistics, shows the origin of customers, and contains customisable settings.
They can also utilise the companion mobile app that’s available for iOS and Android, which provides the status of card sales, displays the highest sales frequencies, shows the origin of customers, and provides insights into the proportion of returning customers.
Plus, SmartPay’s self-service option helps eliminate the need for face-to-face interactions, helping save time and effort.
Building with Better Blueprints
As a key partner, Endava was initially asked to design and build the onboarding platform (based on Salesforce), the merchant portal (.NET and ReactJS), and the companion apps. Our original team consisted of around 10 people focusing only on Salesforce development, but it quickly expanded to about 20 Endavans and has only grown further from there.
With innovation in mind, we used Salesforce as a backend and ReactJS as a frontend for the self-onboarding, which is uncommon in the Salesforce world. Nevertheless, an exceptional delivery was achieved by building an engine of communication between Salesforce and React. We set rendering logic on the backend and actual rendering in React, which allowed full flexibility of development and the ability to fulfil complex UI requirements. Salesforce was only used for the Sales, Know Your Customer, Service, and technical orchestration of onboarding workflows.
Following the outstanding work done by our teams, Concardis asked us to extend and pick up more streams to support them further. A host of UX and UI designers took on the challenge of overhauling the efforts of a previous company to make SmartPay more appealing and user-friendly. Additionally, we successfully transitioned the end-to-end (E2E) testing from another provider, increasing automation and reducing system integration testing (SIT) time from 10+ weeks to three weeks. We also established Application Management (AM) for all our streams, which eventually saw more than 10x improvements on the resolution time.
More recently, when switching to the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) delivery model due to slow speeds and uncertainties in delivery, we onboarded an Agile Coach who provided great support to the teams by successfully guiding them in their adoption of the new interaction model.
We delivered the MVP within six months and continued enriching the platform with new functionality for Concardis’ clients, with subsequent releases on a monthly basis. Our engagement was part of a broader programme that included the development of an Integration Layer and the reshaping of a Processing System for better orchestration of the SmartPay app, onboarding platform, and merchant portal.
Dividing the Task to Multiply Success
The Endava teams are distributed across multiple Delivery Units, with Chisinau handling the portal, mobile apps, E2E testing, and AM, Bucharest focusing on Salesforce and E2E testing, and Iasi working on UX and E2E testing.
Ultimately, the work behind SmartPay is spread throughout several locations and multiple vendors and there has been excellent collaboration onsite and great cooperation among the teams in nearshore sites. At its peak, the SmartPay programme team included roughly 200 people delivering from Germany, Poland, Croatia, Romania, Moldova, and the UK.
WHY ENDAVA?
When You Grow Together with Your Partner
Prior to SmartPay’s conception, Endava’s successful delivery of a different merchant portal project for Concardis proved they could trust us to help develop their “one-stop-shop” payments product.
Along with our established history working with Concardis, they chose us over several larger service providers due to our technical expertise and cost-effective approach. Our competitive advantage also included our experience with configure, price, and quote (CPQ) software and our overall Salesforce skillset.
“Endava is a very reliable partner who understands the client's wishes in advance. Endava has a highly professional team. They know exactly what to do and often make the impossible possible. For me personally, Endava is like a reassurance – it’s good to know they are there. Even in difficult times, like the pandemic, they helped us quickly and unbureaucratically.” – Daniel Emmanuilidis, SmartPay Programme Director, Concardis
“We chose Endava in 2018 to build an innovative onboarding solution and a customer portal for SmartPay. The vision was clear: 30 minutes end-to-end onboarding, customer-centric, fully automated, fully digitised. We successfully reached the goal, and the customers are loving it. In parallel, Endava took over responsibilities in more areas in our product delivery organisation, joining us in a ‘one team’ approach. We significantly improved our product delivery and grew together as people and organisations along this journey, which continues today.
“What I particularly love, is the way each and every Endava team member independent of position or role owns and loves the product we are delivering. It is more than just a job for the people. The team cares for the product. The Endavans are more than delivery partners for me, we are ‘one team’ together delivering an amazing product. Mersi, SmartPay team!” – Frantz Tomety, SmartPay Programme Manager and Release Train Engineer, Concardis
“Since working with the Endava testing team and taking over the role as head of testing, they supported the change with grace and helped wherever they could. They not only helped with testing, but with other teams also to find solutions to support development, be it better strategies for branching or helping with planning for other teams to hit their deadlines.
“The team is dynamic with almost only strengths, and they have made sure everything is covered. The automation team is also making sure that the maintainability and scalability is covered by having cross-team collaboration for the test suites to stay updated. The amount of releases that can be supported per year has more than doubled, which would not have been possible without them. It is and has been a great partnership.” – Jan Ackermann, Manager IT Quality, Concardis
“I love my work – one big reason for that are the great colleagues I have in the SmartPay Run area and what a great job they all are doing. Their skills, their personalities, and their passion make them all so special. I can remember many moments where their performance was exceptional – especially one situation where the team reacted very quickly as we had problems with wrongly informed customers, and they supported directly to help us make our customer experience great again.
“The team reacts quickly and competently to situations in a professional manner and solves them to our complete satisfaction. Everyone can rely on the SmartPay Run team – Always!” – Vural Sahin, SmartPay Service Manager, Concardis
“One of the most important factors that helped us in this journey was our agility, our capability to change rapidly and adapt to the new normal, while never forgetting about our customer and their needs." – Daniela Grosu, Test Manager, Endava
THE BENEFITS
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
SmartPay has helped revolutionise the onboarding process in Concardis by making it fully automated and reducing it from an average of 10+ days to 30 minutes or less. They can now target the German SME market actively with three sales channels via face-to-face sales, call-centre sales, and a self-onboarding option.
This allows SME merchants to fill in all the required onboarding information much faster than before and start processing the next day. What’s more, we’ve created the option for easily defining and launching specific campaigns for targeted client segments to react quickly to market changes.
Endava’s partnership with Concardis on SmartPay has helped push us to generate one of our most complex CPQ implementations to date, and as Concardis’ choice for their unique Salesforce.com (SFDC) vendor, we look forward to helping them continue to achieve their goal to provide their customers with the best payments experiences possible.