Leading Credit Card Company Secures B2B Transactions to Expand Supplier Network

The Brief

To promote the use of their commercial payments network, a leading credit card company partnered with Apexon to create cloud-native applications designed to help their banking partners oversee more B2B payments and calculate rebates. Commercial cards only make up 1% of B2B transactions and their goal was to expand this number.

The Challenge

Multiple parties are involved in the commercial transactions overseen by the company:

• Retail Businesses: companies that make a particular product or service before selling it to consumers (e.g., a shoe retailer that sells to the general public)
• Suppliers: companies that sell products or services to other businesses (e.g., a company that manufactures laces for shoes and sells them to shoe retailers)
• Banks: issue commercial cards to companies and provide them with a line of credit
• Card Network (the financial services company): oversees and conducts transactions between businesses

The company wanted to help banks convince suppliers to join its network. To convince suppliers to join, banks often provide an estimate of the financial advantages of joining the network.

The company wanted to leverage both its internal data and the bank’s transaction data to create an application that helps banks run their campaigns. This app would identify suppliers that banks consider to be of strategic importance, for instance, suppliers likely to join the network or suppliers that have a high volume of transactions. Because each bank and supplier had different business operations and priorities, the app needed to have broad features so that partner banks could align the app to their priorities.

Developing this sort of application requires a back-end architecture that contains a database of suppliers, APIs for banks to retrieve the company’s data, and software to analyze available data on suppliers. The app also needs to be compatible considering each bank has different infrastructure.

The Solution

Apexon designed an interoperable supplier enablement application that serves as a platform for banks to launch campaigns aimed at bringing suppliers into the company’s network. The app was containerized using Docker, allowing it to be implemented on both on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

Apexon created an application that banks can use to analyze data to identify suppliers and develop campaigns. The Data & Analytics Practice collaborated closely with the UX Practice to build the front-end of the application using Node.js. The team also developed a robust back-end architecture that uses a PostgreSQL database to store data on suppliers.

The app used APIs in Python to extract data from relevant sources. The calculations and operations of the company’s Excel files were able to be replicated in an AWS development environment. The app comes in a package that includes a small virtual environment so that it can be run on any system, from on-prem databases to public clouds run hosted by all providers.

With the supplier enablement application, banks can simply input a file into the application and it automatically identifies suppliers considered to be the most strategic additions to the network. Data is updated and calculations are all done on the back-end, ensuring that users receive accurate information.

The Results

The Data & Analytics team developed a cloud-compatible application that makes it effortless to leverage data to develop future strategies.

Through our Supplier Enablement application, partner banks can:

• Run strategic campaigns
• Intelligently provide suppliers with appropriate incentives to join the network
• Leverage the company’s bandwidth to reach new commercial clients
• Reduce transaction costs for issuers, businesses, and suppliers

Faster and more secure payment methods
Grow commercial network
Capitalize on rapidly growing card payment industry