Open bank-based, real-time payment solution for a UK fintech startup
Building a digital product for a customer from a fintech industry is always a challenge. The market is heavily regulated and developed unevenly across the world’s regions. However, somewhere between cutting-edge technology and tons of paperwork, amazing things happen. In this case study, we briefly describe our collaboration with a UK-based fintech startup and our role in implementing a real-time payments platform for the biggest bank in Latin America.
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Disclaimer: All the information relating to the client is protected by an NDA agreement, therefore we have avoided using names that could identify them. For the purpose of this case study, we’ll refer to them as ‘the client.
The Client
The client is one of the leading, UK-based, fintech companies. It specializes in real-time payments that are accessible thanks to open banking solutions. The client’s offer is an alternative to traditional, online microtransactions based on card payments carried out by companies like Visa or Mastercard.
In recent years, the client has received a $23.5 million Series A funding round.
The client works mainly with enterprise companies, including the banking and e-commerce sectors.
Due to rapid growth, the client was looking for a trustworthy and experienced partner who could provide immediate support. They wanted to scale their existing solution to new markets in Latin America, namely Brazil.
The client selected Boldare for three reasons:
- Highly-valued specialists with previous experience in similar products.
- Able to start development quickly.
- Efficient and supportive sales process.
Overall, Boldare was well placed to support fast growth, had a high understanding of the client’s business model, and experience in similar products.
The product
The client’s platform offers a global real-time payment network. It helps e-commerce business owners to boost sales conversion and accelerate cash flow, offering secure, stable and quick payments.
Their system allows e-commerce customers to buy goods online. Thanks to the open banking system, money is transferred to the destination bank account within seconds or minutes, unlike in the case of credit or debit card payments where transactions can take days.
This way, customers can have their products faster, and their money lands in the store’s account almost instantly. It’s a convenient solution for e-commerce companies that sell and buy products in bulk. When they receive payments from customers instantly, they don’t have to waste funds on storage and can buy commodities on receipt of the orders. The platform was developed by the client’s in-house team located in Poland.
The solution
Boldare’s goal was to support the creation of a scalable platform that would be able to deal with high volumes of payments for the Brazilian market, specifically one of the company’s partners - Itaú Unibanco, the largest banking institution in Brazil and Latin America.
One of the most important objectives was to make sure that the implementation would be stable enough to maintain uninterrupted access to the service and handle thousands of transactions hourly. Frequent interruptions to the platform’s service would undermine trust in the system. That’s why we decided that the platform should be based on distributed architecture, microservices and asynchronous processing.
To meet all the technological and quality requirements, we appointed a team composed of:
- Three backend developers specializing in PHP and microservices.
- A scrum master who was supporting the team but also played the role of agile coach to the client’s entire development department.
Simultaneously, Boldare’s team was working on the development of one of the client’s apps - a tracking system for open banking payments used by e-commerce companies. Our team was also responsible for reducing the technological debt of the entire platform.
Tech stack
The platform’s development was based on the following tools and solutions: PHP, microservices, Kubernetes, CQRS, domain-driven design, MySQL, Postgres, and AWS Cloud.
Results
During six months of collaboration, our team successfully co-created a product that enabled the client’s expansion into the Brazilian market. The platform is highly scalable and flexible. It enables the client’s customers to handle several dozen secure transactions daily - up to 2,000 payments in and out per hour, and around 50k daily.
If you want to learn more about our services or you want to discuss your product idea - contact us!
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