xpate cut payout time for e-commerce merchants from 7 days to minutes

The Software House was brought in to design and build a new AWS-powered payment platform that would replace xpate's legacy financial infrastructure and speed up payout processing for e-commerce merchants.

E-commerce sellers using xpate's platform had to wait 3-10 days before receiving payouts to their external accounts. This delay put their operations on hold and created friction in the user experience. xpate needed to double their delivery speed but lacked the in-house talent and cloud expertise to rebuild their payment infrastructure fast enough.

xpate

xpate is a fintech company that provides payment processing tools for e-commerce merchants. Since 2018, they've expanded their services to include 6 finance-processing tools. The company is a long-time AWS customer focused on reducing friction in online payment workflows.

INDUSTRY

Fintech

COUNTRY

UK

SERVICE PROVIDED

Product Design & Development, Cloud Architecture

Challenge

E-commerce sellers often wait for days to receive purchase earnings, which need to travel from the sales platform to the bank or a digital account.

xpate believed it can reach a breakthrough that would minimize the payout time for their clients. How? By implementing a merchant's account with money transfer functionality. That required setting up new cloud architecture for that project.

On paper, all sellers who use xpate's paygates for their e-stores (or other service) could access and use their earnings immediately after purchase.

xpate decided to collaborate with The Software House, recognized by clients for its AWS expertise, to help the company double the delivery speed.

Key challenges and requirements:

-> Replace legacy payment gateway that took 3-10 days to process payouts

-> Design a new serverless backend infrastructure optimized for transaction processing

-> Build integrations with payment gateway, ledger, omnichannel communication platform, and signing platform

-> Create custom business logic to enable xpate's unique value proposition

-> Develop a secure client portal for e-commerce merchants

-> Launch an MVP in 4 months

-> Fill talent and knowledge gaps quickly without long recruitment cycles

Solution

The Software House filled xpate's talent gap in just one month and took over the complete design and development of the new payment platform. Instead of hiring individual engineers piece by piece, xpate got a full product team that could start immediately - a Cloud Architect, 7 Developers, a DevOps Engineer, a QA Engineer, and a Project Manager, all reporting to xpate's CTO.

After a month of cloud engineering workshops, The Software House's architect and xpate's CTO designed the backend infrastructure using the Serverless framework to handle each transaction from merchants' stores.

"We’ve scaled up the team and now work with architects, the CEO, and a project manager from The Software House.

This particular team is more skilled than the ones I've worked with on previous engagements. The Software House has invested in developing their engineers and bringing them to a new level, adjusting to the market’s needs."

Ruben Vosmeer

CTO at xpate

Process

Team Composition

• 1 Cloud Architect

• 7 Developers

• 1 DevOps Engineer

• 1 QA Engineer

• 1 Project Manager
  

All team members reported directly to xpate's CTO.

Technology Stack

• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS

• Backend Framework: Serverless framework

• Compute: AWS Lambda

• Frontend: Next.js (using UI designed by xpate)

Development Process

Architecture Design

After a month of cloud engineering workshops, The Software House's architect and xpate's CTO designed the backend infrastructure based on the Serverless framework, which would process each transaction from the merchant's store.The Serverless framework solved multiple problems at once. It kept operational costs low through pay-per-use pricing. It freed xpate's engineers from server management so they could focus on building more integrations. And it gave the platform the ability to scale automatically based on transaction volume - critical for a growing fintech company.

AWS Solutions Implementation

The team built the entire payment platform on AWS infrastructure, using multiple services to create a secure, scalable solution:

• AWS Lambda – A compute service that runs code on Amazon's infrastructure and provides automatic resource management to free engineers from server management. Used for backend operations and business logic.

• Amazon SQS – Self-contained service for message transferring between app components without restrictions on volume. Used for asynchronous communication.

• Amazon DynamoDB – NoSQL database with performance counted in milliseconds that's guaranteed by AWS.

• AWS KMS – A centralized cryptographic service that offers access control, data signing and encryption, and policy management in one place.

• Amazon S3 – Stored documents used by the product and data backups as a reliable and easy-to-manage and configure service.

• AWS SecretManager – A separate service that manages sensitive credentials.

• Amazon WAF – Anti-exploit and security management service that centralizes policy management.

• AWS App Runner – Container management service used for the client portal that doesn't require pre-existing architecture.

The Serverless framework enabled xpate to limit operational costs thanks to its pay-for-use model. It also allows xpate's engineers to implement dozens of valuable integrations.

payment platform xpate

Platform Integrations

The Software House delivered several integrations:

• Payment gateway

• Ledger

• Omnichannel client communication platform

• Signing platform

The team also provided custom software to support the platform with the business logic that enabled xpate's unique selling proposition.

Merchant Portal

Our team delivered a secure client portal for e-commerce merchants. The frontend used the UI designed by xpate to present new money-processing functions to sellers, including:

• Instant payout requests to external accounts

• Exchanging currencies between GBP and EUR

Protecting Third-Party Integrations with Observability

As part of the infrastructure work, TSH team completed several observability-related objectives:

• Monitoring the state of both the core app and third-party integrations as well as quickly finding errors by analyzing app behavior

• App performance analysis

• Gathering insights for future improvements

To achieve these objectives on the frontend, the team used the Sentry app monitoring system. Other relevant tools included:

• AWS CloudWatch – for collecting logs, metrics, and event data in real-time

• AWS X-Ray – collecting and analyzing interactions between components

• Datadog – enhancing capabilities of the other tools through comprehensive visualizations, monitoring, and alerting
  

→ xpate's new data lake built with a $18K AWS grant saves hours of analysis

Fintech

Data Solutions

Outcome

Together, we built the MVP of the platform in 4 months, allowing xpate to take it live by the end of March 2023.