When a leading financial institution decided to grow its capabilities in the billings space through the acquisition of a well-established specialist company, they anticipated the usual challenges around inheriting legacy architecture. But when the original platform was clearly preventing them from growing the business, the technology team made the wise decision to get an experienced technology company with payments expertise to provide an independent architectural review. That's where Endava came in.
The main challenge was the slow onboarding of new merchants, meaning that the business was losing revenue and merchants were becoming impatient. Following an in-depth review of the current state of the platform and a holistic approach to suggesting improvements, based on the strategy, user-experience and engineering capabilities of the Endava team, a partnership was formed that would continue to grow and flourish for years to come.
In order to reduce the onboarding time significantly, a technology modernisation was required. Endava worked collaboratively with the business to design a new cloud-based platform built on microservices. The platform allows the business to create a unique instance for each of their clients. These independent instances allow for a more bespoke set up that can be tailored to a particular merchant needs and removes the risk of interdependences, providing better service delivery.
Adding automation to the platform was essential to ensure that the onboarding processes as quick and seamless as possible. Endava developed a configuration management tool that allows the team to describe and launch a new client instance effortlessly. Automation is also built into the agile delivery model, utilising continuous delivery and continuous integration to improve responsiveness to customer feedback and dev-ops to automate the pipeline. By selecting an on-demand cloud model, costs are also reduced because the business is only paying for the capacity they need at any given time and have the ability to instantly grow to meet market demand, providing them with a competitive advantage.
Thanks to the trust and partnership between the business and Endava, a new way of working has emerged. Collaboration between the internal teams in the business is coordinated through agile meetings led by Endava, who bring together the product owners who define the requirements and the technology departments who are accountable for the implementation.
The new platform allows clients to be onboarded in a couple of hours, significantly improved from the months it took in the past. It also allows the business to analyse the cost and benefits of providing more bespoke solutions to specialist clients.
Thanks to agile delivery, new products can be developed and launched more quickly, and the excellent engineering capability of the Endava team helps bring the business' vision to life. As the partnership continues to progress, a number of innovation sessions have been conducted, keeping everyone working on the project engaged and excited for the future.