Fintech cloud solution for donations

The platform allowing people around the world to make all kinds of payments to support worldwide brands and small creators – investments, donations and other payments with no border restrictions and no transaction fees with the approach which resulted in a 70% retention rate of new users on the platform.

About

The initial business in the financial domain offered their services in support of small creators with donations in one area. They wished to scale worldwide to allow more small businesses to receive a decent valuation for their crafting on one platform. That should satisfy both categories of users - creators and donors with the application of most of the payment systems and official reports for different countries.

Challenge

Being comfortable for both creators and fans, the payment platform should allow making payments, getting payment reports, connecting your account to various vaults, paying income taxes, building the community around your brand and promoting the crafting worldwide.

Solution

Incorporation of the DevOps culture into the business processes and development life cycle as the basis for reliable delivery pipeline

Pecularities of implementation

Architecture design to support high scaling rate, high load and response

As the first step, the team conducted complementary research of the market which together with business requirements and ideations defined the roadmap of the future platform. After analysing the requirements, the team moved to the specific cloud solution based on AWS. The architectural design was based on the modular structure of the platform with separate attachable blocks with different functions. With the initial product, the deployments were handled manually which was not suitable for the new distribution model and load. So as the first step in the development process, the team set up multiple environments Dev, Staging, and Production for better quality retention, and then automated the continuous delivery pipeline for faster time to market. Several APIs connected the platform with responsible payment systems and supportive services. The payment system as the basis of the platform received its own engine core that separated the transactions according to their categories allowing avoiding doubling transactions.

Development of the user experience system with vibrant visuals

As the basis for the visual appearance, the team had to take the first version of the platform not to disrupt existing users. Anyway, the evaluation of the existing solution was made during the discovery stage to underline any existing strong and weak points available there. As the result, the team created a specific strategy bound with the business goals and market trends to stay vivid among the competitors. The milestones of the created roadmap included the development of three user journeys with unique UX, making a visual system helping to satisfy the business mission and privacy by default approach to the entire project. As far as the platform was developed for several kinds of users, it included several user journeys based on the user type. The first one was for the visitors/donators, the other for creators or businesses and the last one is for moderators or admins. All these flows underwent specific testing and got several changes during the development process. The blocks included several dashboards for every user type, an explainer to understand the sources of the income that were utilised and in what way, the channels of the connection of the external vaults or payment services. As the mission of the platform was in the promotion of crafting, it also included the social interaction area with vibrant visuals serving business goals. This included the gamification of simple tasks like loading screens and verification prompts that have made the processes easier and fun to use even aside from the core function of the platform.

Development-deployment process automatisation

One of the initial milestones of the team was the scheduling and automated deployment of containerized application modules which finalised the development process lifecycle. Together with the cloud environment adjustment, the team made a stable process of deployment that could be done automatically without any interruptions. Automated technological scripts incorporated the quality stage as well on every stage of the pipeline. Version, configuration and cluster management allowed more stable releases and better reactions to any issues arising with the Production environment. The support of the team in orchestrating the environment ensured customer growth and removed single points of failure. Throughout the entire development process, the team created the documentation which was finalised and submitted to the customer in full after the platform market launch. Creation of the documentation allowed faster services management and quality assurance with strong scaling possibilities.

Results

The platform underwent total architectural recreation and migrated to cloud services. The development and deployment processes due to automatisation became predictable and more reliable. And the integrated panel managing versions, configurations and clusters brought more stability to the platform. The payment core of the system was developed with the data-driven approach which allowed the introduction of the true necessary functions with attention to security. Deliberate UX planning and segregation of it into several flows introduced high-target key metrics and platform popularity within the users' community.