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Business Overview

Business Overview

The client is a fintech company that provides a modular online banking platform for businesses to provide payment processing to their customers. The platform is customized to the company’s needs through rapid deployment, reducing operating costs. Their leadership reached out to us with a request to enhance one of their platforms in order to grow their B2B distribution on a global scale. We had to reinforce existing financial software and develop new features making it high-performance and multifunctional—handle high load, protect financial data with an extensive anti money laundering (AML) module, and provide currency exchange and P2P and P2M payments all over the European Economic Area in just a few clicks.

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Challenge

For the platform to withstand a high load of 400k+ transactions per day and run smoothly with complex functionality, we had to address the following issues:

Enhance system performance and scalability by moving from cumbersome monolithic architecture to flexible microservice architecture.

Integrate a global payment system SEPA used for cashless payments, increasing cross-border market opportunities all over 36 SEPA-using countries.

Develop an advanced AML module to protect the platform and sensitive financial data against fraudulent activities and usage by unauthorized individuals and companies.

Solution

The project was ambitious and large-scale. The NIX team made software comprising the whole payment lifecycle—from remote consumer onboarding, person identification, AML check to payment management and statistics, and reporting to banks and tax authorities. The payment flow was bound to the National Bank of Lithuania.

Microservice Architecture

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Microservice Architecture

Existing monolithic architecture merged all system pieces into a huge unit with tightly coupled functions and dependencies. This decreased transaction speed, impaired overall platform performance, and made it hard to manage the product. 

The NIX team migrated software from monolithic architecture built on PHP to microservices made on the Golang (Go) programming language. We divided a large system into smaller independent parts with their own logic, flow, and realm of responsibility, decentralizing data and distributing the load. As a result, 50+ microservices were created, making the platform easily-scalable and much faster—transaction speed increased by 60 times.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Migration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Migration

Initially, the platform was hosted on on-premise Lithuanian data centers. We migrated the system to the AWS cloud service—this allowed for intelligent performance management based on autoscaling, cloud computing, real-time data processing, prolonged uptime, and better protection of sensitive data than on-premise servers.

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Integrations and Compliances

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Integrations and Compliances

The client’s platform is compliant with financial regulations like Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which controls the initiation and processing of electronic payments and the protection of consumers’ financial data.

We provided seamless operation with multiple integrations enabling blazing-fast transactions even during high load.

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    SEPA

    The NIX team integrated Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payments, enabling recurring and one-off personal and business transactions in euros across 36 European countries. The module consisted of three distinct parts, each performing specific functions:

    SEPA credit transfer (SCT)—a common, one-time funds transfer from one bank account to another.

    SEPA instant credit transfer (SCT Inst)—instant payments processed within seconds.

    SEPA direct debit (SDD)—a type of recurring payment, being a pull-based transfer from a customer’s account or a business account to an initiating company’s account.

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    FPS payments

    We linked the platform with Fast Payment System (FPS), which connects traditional bank payments, electronic transactions, and digital wallet operations.

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    BACS payments

    The team integrated Bankers Automated Clearing Services (BACS) payments, which represents bank-to-bank transfer between banks in the UK, providing a wide range of transaction types and fees.

Anti Money Laundering (AML) Module

Anti Money Laundering (AML) Module

It was crucial to make the platform secure to protect its sensitive data, detecting suspicious activity that indicates to money laundering, securities fraud, terrorist financing, market manipulation, etc. For this, we developed an AML module—which was challenging due to dealing with numerous third-party resources—each with its own standards and treatment rules. Adherence to AML policies was provided by means of:

  • Know your customer (KYC) validation—third-party identity verification to make the user fully known to the system (documents, IBAN, etc.).
  • Politically exposed people (PEP)/ sanctions check according to the DOW Jones list
  • Beneficiaries and banks’ review for eligibility—Russian and Belarusian banks were excluded from the compliance list.
  • Transaction screening and monitoring, including payment purpose, amount, limits, and more.
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Mock Service

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Mock Service

The processing of some scenarios could take several days since certain test environments operated only during the National Bank of Lithuania’s business hours, which greatly slowed down the work. To resolve this issue, the NIX team developed a multipurpose mock service that simulated the bank’s behavior, enabling us to get identical responses as if it were a real bank but without being tied to office hours. Moreover, the mock service enabled the platform to process real transactions 24/7.

The Platform’s Features

  • Single and recurring P2P and P2M transactions
  • SEPA, FPS, and BACS payments, including instant payments
  • 24/7 availability
  • Currency exchange
  • Fee transaction support
  • Automatic transaction reprocessing and chargeback
  • Access to payment reports and statistics
  • Comprehensive AML procedure to oversee financial policies
  • Mobile banking

The Platform’s Performance

  • 150k+ active users
  • 400k+ transactions per day
  • 10 transactions processed per second
  • SEPA instant payments are completed within 10 seconds
  • Internal transactions between your accounts are processed within 5 seconds
  • FPS and BACS payments may take from 1 minute to several hours, depending on the recipient’s bank response
  • SEPA Credit Transfer may need 2-3 hours
  • SEPA Direct Debit—one transaction may take 2-15 days depending on the recipient’s bank response

Outcome

With our help, the client got a fully-fledged and secure financial platform for making payments across 36 European countries due to integrations with SEPA, FPS, and BACS payment systems. Before the enhancement, the leadership client pool consisted of 5 companies, and now the number has increased to 30+ businesses using the platform for their financial needs.

The NIX team has continued working on the platform to further expand its functionality, increasing performance up to 1 million transactions from 400k+ active users per day—we are firmly approaching the results.

Team:

18 (Project Manager, 2 Business Analysts, Engineering Manager,

2 Tech Leads, 5 PHP/GO Developers, 2 GO Developers, 5 QA Engineers)

Tech Stack:

AWS, Apache Kafka, Angular, PHP, Golang

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