Modernization of compliance and payment platform
Optimizing global portal databases helping retailers and cities to monitor the recycling of 50 billion used bottles and cans a year in the world
Currencies Direct
CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
They have been on a mission to simplify moving money internationally for almost thirty years and we're as passionate as ever about helping our customers send and spend with ease.
Project Challenge
Currencies Direct platforms were in need of a much deserved facelift both at the application layer and at the database layer. One of the main complexities for payment platforms is the need to have up-to-date persisted databases with minimal caching mechanisms. Exchange rates are changing all the time and payments need to be confirmed properly before acting accordingly.
Solution
Phase 1: The Architecture
Not only was the infrastructure upgraded, the software (application framework and the database version) were also getting a major uplift. High availability and disaster recovery were also a major new addition, as well as data-in-transit and at rest encrypted. Finally the new data model required a custom tool to migrate data in the new setup with minimal downtime. On top of that, Currencies Direct required a much more sophisticated compliance platform to handle the KYC requirements. As it was changing frequently, a mix of traditional relational database and nosql was put into place for this newly created compliance platform. The modernization did also bring additional benefits with technical debt reduction, better data maintenance, better monitoring and better query performance.
Phase 2: The Rebuild
Once the tooling was in place and the data model built accordingly, an iterative series of data migration and data validation happened that took several months until all data was fully transformed correctly and that the new application code was handling the new features correctly. This phase was the longest and most tedious phase but the result was phenomenal.
Phase 3: The Migration
The main complexity of this phase is to minimize the downtime and specific toolings was created to handle the incremental load and be in sync before the cutover. Thanks to CHDS, we were able to handle the migration in minutes of downtime in the night and clients (B2C) did not have any disruption for the platforms.
Phase 4: Post optimization
The post optimization phase had a bunch of additional works such as the data warehouse built, the DPO module and the BigData project to detect fraud (using Cassendra).