Three payment products behind one front door
Confidential · Payments
The business said
- “Keep selling three separate payment systems”
- “White-label a third-party switch”
- “Rewrite everything as one monolith”
- “Staff another integration team per product”
- “One API gateway that fronts every device and every product”
Three payment products were not three businesses. They were one platform waiting for a single front door.
An API gateway and microservice core unifying card-present payments
A payments technology provider had accumulated three separate payment solutions, each with its own integration surface. Merchants and device partners had to integrate differently depending on which product they landed on, and every internal roadmap item had to be built three times. The company did not need another payment product. It needed the three it had to stop being three.
The unification happened at the edges and the core at once. On the edge, an application for card-entry devices reads a card however it arrives, swiped, tapped, or inserted, and speaks to exactly one place: a single API gateway built on Apigee. Behind the gateway, the core payment capabilities were rebuilt as microservices, so each function scales and evolves independently while presenting one coherent API to the outside world.
The scale of the consolidation was the hard part. The program ran with a team of more than seventy engineers, and still delivered in a year and a half, the fastest delivery of its size the client had seen. Getting there took ruthless interface discipline: the gateway contract was the product, and everything behind it had to conform.
The result is one integration story instead of three. A device partner integrates once and reaches every product; the provider builds a feature once and every channel gets it. The acquisitions finally behave like a platform.
- 3 into 1, products unified
- Apigee, gateway
- microservices, core
- 1.5 years, delivered in
- 70+ engineers, team
