Apexon has been a strategic digital technology services partner for the company. Engagements included development of a merchant portal and digital wallet; data migration and analytics for B2B applications for a platform for banks; integrating multiple acquired products; and supporting the company’s technology User Experience team. Apexon helped address three core challenges across all of these projects.
Success Story Financial Services
Global Payments Brand Accelerates Digital Innovation & Market AdvantageApexon supports enhancements in UX Design, Development, Cloud, Analytics and Quality Assurance 
This company is a major player in global payments, with over $10B in revenues per year. Despite its continued success, it looks for every opportunity to leverage digital to improve the way it serves its customers and partners, and drive new operational efficiencies in the business.
Apexon has been a strategic digital engineering services partner for the company since 2016 and has continued to expand its involvement in the company’s digital transformation efforts. To date, these engagements include helping to develop a merchant portal, a digital wallet, B2B applications for a platform for banks, integrating acquired products, and supporting multiple Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) and the company’s technology User Experience team.
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Global payments company fueled by technology inovation
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Founded in 1966
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Over $10B USD in revenue
The customer journey
Digital Wallet
- Merchant portal
Digital Wallet
- Company pass/ Secure Remote Commerce (SRC)
Product POCs
- Unified commerce
Operations & Technology
Real Time Payments
- Integrating Real Time Payments (RTP) and Company’s Payment Services (CPS) products into the Mastercard infrastructure and testing acquired products
Product POCs
- Tap on phone
Operations & Technology
- Ireland expansion – UX
Data & Services
- CPIC ADD dev for market test with banks
Data & Services
- CPIC app dev for one bank
- Productions
the Results
Key Outcomes
Post-merger product
integration leading to
enhanced global footprint
& increased revenues
integration leading to
enhanced global footprint
& increased revenues
Development of digital
payment products to
offset competitive
threats
payment products to
offset competitive
threats
Faster More Secure
Commercial Payment
Processing
Commercial Payment
Processing
Increased penetration &
adoption of B2B virtual
card offering
adoption of B2B virtual
card offering
Increased B2B user
efficiency
efficiency
improved
Digital UX
Digital UX
Faster Development
Cycles
Cycles
Increased
Service Levels
Service Levels
The challenge
Improving Company’s digital technology strategy
Data Analytics & Cloud Infrastructure The B2B applications for the banking platform required deep data analytics and infrastructure capabilities that could help banks target the right partners and suppliers and share data back and forth.
Integration & Testing of Acquired Products The company has made multiple acquisitions across the globe, requiring integration and comprehensive functional and non-functional testing to bring these products onto a common platform for customers.
UX Design & Development The company prides itself on offering its customers modern and intuitive user experiences. And it values user empathy as the foundation of a healthy design process. But it simply did not have the right resources to deliver on them. It needed additional expertise to develop key user insights and identify user pain points, inform and validate design decisions, and measure success through UX research using Design Thinking and user-centered design methodologies.
Making all these challenges even more difficult was a critical resource crunch at the company in the face of tight timeframes to deliver on its goals. Bringing in new resources that did not understand the company’s technical environment and ecosystem would have only extended the process and risked the quality of the end deliverables.
Some of its specific deliverable requirements included:
Acquired product
integration and testing
UX vision for a suite
of B2B products
UI design
standardization
UX measurement
strategy
Engaging UX into Scaled Agile
Framework product development
Framework for estimating
UX capacity
Establishing a mature UX research practice for a program
The Solution
Key involvement from planning to execution
As mentioned above, Apexon had a long history with the company. Our technical resources have been involved in the planning and delivery of multiple digital products and services for the company. The combination of Apexon’s UX/UI development, Cloud, and Quality Engineering expertise and in-depth knowledge of the company’s technical environment addressed the big gaps holding the company’s digital initiatives back.
Apexon engaged with the client on multiple fronts:
1
User/Customer Experience (UX/CX)
Apexon helped the company reimagine the user experience for its B2B customers and its most used B2B security solutions, including:
Exploratory UX Activities to understand current state of the user experience:
- • End-user and stakeholder interviews
- • Observation studies
- • Benchmarking usability tests
- • Heuristic evaluation
- • Task analysis
- • Surveys and secondary research
- • Ecosystem mapping
- • UI audit
- • Design-Thinking workshops
- • Persona creation and journey mapping
Establishing a UX vision and roadmap aligned with business strategy:
- • Ideation workshops
- • Prioritization workshops
- • Information architecture design
- • UX outcome and success measurement definition
- • Concept design/sketching
Evaluative and operational UX activities to ensure design products and services work well for the intended user audiences:
- • Low-fi prototyping
- • Hi-fi prototyping
- • Concept tests
- • Usability tests
- • Analytics review
- • A/B testing
- • Customer satisfaction surveys
Design implementation activities to provide a consistent end-user experience across the platform and reusability of shared UI components:
- • Design standardization
- • Design systems and subsystems creation
- • Annotated wireframing
- • Designer-developer process improvement
2
Digital Engineering
Apexon worked with the client’s development teams to ensure the company stayed on the cutting edge of technology. The development engagement included everything from Legacy platform modernization and new product development initiatives to building core product features to brainstorming and executing on innovations with Alexa Skills and mobile apps. Specific efforts included:
User Interface Development
Merchant portal, digital wallet, and B2B applications for a platform for banks
Credit Card product UI and API development and its accompanying merchant portal
Modernized Switch UI and backend services, building RESTful services while pushing to reorganize the server-side code
Developed the company’s merchant portal using angular and node JS
Helped support the legacy loyalty card user interface
Helped redesign and implement a re-platformed version of the loyalty card User Interface
Native mobile development for Android and iOS
Deployed React on front end to enable set up, control, review, and approval of applications for merchants and their customers
Backend Development
Digital wallet and B2B applications for a platform for banks
Helped re-platform the legacy loyalty card APIs to micro-services
Supported the product for any production issues
Developed a variety of new features required for the service
Manage Akamai routing configurations
Java for rebate user authorization and user authentication (SSO, SSL, SAML 2.0)
Analyze and curtail any API gateway parity differences
Assistance with architectural designs and development for microservices needed for digital payment platforms
Cloud Engineering
Digital wallet
SaaS architecture and development
Helped re-platform the service to be deployed on Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Cloud platform management
Developed the event and logging framework used in secure remote commerce for Splunk monitoring and event tracking
Helped develop account management services for secure remote commerce to be deployed on Pivotal Cloud Foundry
DevOps & CI/CD
Integrating acquired products
Agile transformation and best practices
Helped build continuous integration pipelines for the acquired products for countries around the globe
DevOps and process automation
Supported regular release deployments for the acquired product hubs
Help build governance for the payment services integration for deployment using Chef
Help company’s engineering teams integrate with many of its internal services
Quality Assurance Engineering
Integrating acquired products
Helped build automation for Functional testing required for multiple products
Increased coverage for the product testing for faster go-live
Building a team to help with non-functional and performance testing for acquired products
3
Cloud & Analytics
Apexon was also involved in Data Ops, Architecture and Design. This encompassed:
Data extraction, MDM, data schema, data quality and governance
Cloud and big data analytics, business intelligence
AI and machine learning
Dashboards and data visualization
Mainframe (MIPS) and data warehousing
AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud