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FTSE-250 company launches an eCommerce gateway to rival the World's best
Finance
How a FTSE-250 financial services company launched a fully compliant, fully automated eCommerce gateway
Our client was a traditional organisation, issuing payments and cards, without a significant digital capability. Their ambition was to change that – with a green-field eCommerce gateway – and Equal Experts’ help.
Starting from a small team Inception, we proceeded to a working prototype, launching with a full offering just months later. New ways of working enabled the larger team to go from infrequent releases to multiple releases a day.
A huge success, the gateway now handles higher volumes of transactions and is growing consistently (10-15% over the last two quarters). The platform has been sold as a white label, SaaS product to multiple financial institutions. Huge advances in cloud and infrastructure engineering have been achieved. In combination with a fully compliant, fully automated infrastructure this enables the client to compete with major players such as World Pay – and win.
Outcomes
6 months
from budget approval to first live transaction
4 million
transactions in the first year, worth more than 0.5bn USD and counting
10-15%
growth over just two quarters
About the client
The client is a major provider of online payment solutions to merchants and financial institutions in the Middle East with an annual turnover of c.$350m.
Industry
Finance
Organisation size
1,300+ employees
Location
Middle East
Challenge
Scaling up, scaling fast
Since launch, the underlying architecture and engineering has allowed the platform to rapidly scale, meaning that all merchants have been successfully migrated onto the gateway. But with the gateway in a steady state, no one rested on their laurels – instead the knowledge and capability gained during the payment gateway project has been used to explore other opportunities in the digital payment solution space.
Solution
A dynamic digital wallet that empowers customers
For the past year, the team have been looking into QR payments and other ways to create a more dynamic, digital wallet (similar to other P2M (Person to Merchant) offerings such as Google Pay or Apple Pay). From there, the client has taken the next step into P2P (person to person) transactions, and they are now actively exploring how to sell these propositions to financial institutions as well as mobile network operators. The key aspect baked into every aspect of the offering is flexibility – customers can configure the platform, mix and match propositions, create new combinations, choose how to pay. The power is in making customers powerful.
Results
Succeeding in the age of Covid
Despite the impacts of Covid, especially the disruption to the previously co-located teams, the work has gone from strength to strength. Indeed, the two companies have evolved their working relationship into new and exciting territory, as demonstrated by Equal Experts’ involvement in a new project which involves a mixed team of stakeholders interrogating new ideas, and substantiating the best of them with a business case – answering such questions as: does the idea have good market fit, how much revenue would we hope to make year one, how much would it cost to launch, and how long would it take?
In this way, expertise and domain knowledge can be shared during the entire decision-making process, to tackle the ‘why’ – not just the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Now questions are asked earlier, assumptions are exposed and (dis)proved, solutions proposed and experiments designed.