In 2011, a forward-thinking payments company knew that they needed to make their business more responsive and wanted to start their agile transformation. The goal was to facilitate the growth of their global e-commerce business, and the first step was to find the right technology partner for the job. They were conscious that they wanted a team that was close by, who had an excellent track record in the payments industry, and who knew how to practice what they preached when it came to Agile.
The team decided to start small, with a new and significant project. It was the step in the right direction that led to big things in the future.
By working so closely with Endava, initially to develop an improved user experience on mobile payments pages and then across the entire e-commerce platform, the team learnt on-the-job from Endava’s experts in our proprietary, tried and tested Agile methodology. As part of this very successful partnership, Endava has been responsible for training team members in key roles, including product owners and business analysts.
An element of gamification was added to ensure the code quality was kept at an exacting standard, and by appealing to the competitive nature of the team, it made learning something new that much more enjoyable. Furthermore, it meant that a large number of agile teams were working on the same code base simultaneously, allowing the business to scale and deliver significant new features to the market in a shorter timeframe.
Today, thanks to the success of the approach, the programme is fully Agile
This new agile way of working started to produce tangible benefits reasonably quickly. Being able to launch products four times faster in response to a market opportunity is always going to be a good thing. By adding a purpose-built test automation framework into the mix, six thousand tests could be run in only two hours, reducing costs, decreasing time to market and increasing confidence in the code quality significantly. In the first two years, gateway transactions increased in excess of 40% year on year.
But what was really impressive for merchants was the ability to reduce the time it took to be onboarded and start receiving services down from over three months down to only a couple of weeks. Key customers also benefit further from bespoke services that can be delivered quickly and with high quality and accuracy. Today, both large and fast-growing merchants in 146 counties use this service to accept payments across multiple channels and payment types.
The world of payments continues to evolve at a rapid pace. New and exciting payment methods are making it easier than ever for consumers to get their hands-on goods and services, meaning merchants can't afford to get left behind.
Today, the team provides merchants with bleeding-edge customer spend analytics generated by each transaction and consumers have a seamless payments experience. The number of people trained in agile has grown significantly and the partnership with Endava has gone from strength to strength. There are over 25 scrum teams working together to produce products that deliver unrivalled reliability and customer satisfaction, ensuring the success of the overall business.