How a global payments leader laid the blueprint for scalable, cloud-native processing.
Context
A world leader in payments, serving millions of merchants worldwide, was reaching breaking point with its legacy backbone. Overnight batch processing models were already strained - running late, failing under peak volumes, and forcing entire transaction sets to be reprocessed at high cost. Every new feature took months to deliver, blocked by silos between QA, development, and infrastructure.
Leadership knew patching the system was unsustainable. Without a transformation, the company risked system failures, strained client relationships, and spiralling costs - particularly as millions were already being sunk into extending outdated Oracle support just to keep the lights on.
Albany Beck was brought in to stabilise today’s services while proving tomorrow’s model: a scalable, event-driven architecture capable of continuous transaction processing and future-ready innovation.
Vision
- Scalability: Move to containerised, cloud-native microservices that could handle growth.
- Resilience: Replace overnight batch runs with event-driven, continuous processing to spread workloads across the day.
- Agility: Break down silos and empower cross-functional teams to deliver faster, safer innovation.
The challenge was to balance short-term delivery pressures with long-term transformation, keeping the business running while building the foundations for change.
Approach
Our consultants embedded technical leadership and delivery expertise, addressing both architecture and ways of working.
- Modernising services while meeting deadlines: Took responsibility for key chargeback and correction services, delivering quarterly goals on time while introducing modern practices.
- Automating QA and freeing delivery: Introduced Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), training developers and QA to replace manual checks with automated functional and integration testing. This began reducing manual testing from >90% to closer to 50%.
- Proving event-driven processing: Gradually introduced domain events, first for monitoring and alerting, then evolving into the backbone of a prototype event-driven microservice.
- Building future-ready prototypes: Designed and delivered a greenfield microservice using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), deployed on AWS. This provided a working model to validate the scalability and performance benefits of cloud-native microservices.
- Changing how teams worked: Led workshops with architects and business analysts, demonstrating new design patterns and building a blueprint for cross-functional, empowered service teams.
By combining hands-on technical improvements with organisational change and prototyping, we created immediate value while proving a future-ready path forward.
Results
Our work gave the client confidence that a cloud-native, event-driven future was possible, while keeping critical services running today.
- On-time delivery: Quarterly goals consistently achieved, even while introducing new architectures and practices.
- Efficiency gains: Automated testing halved reliance on QA silos, freeing teams to focus on higher-value delivery.
- Faster insight: Domain events enabled real-time monitoring and business-readable alerts, a major improvement over delayed overnight reporting.
- Future-proofed blueprint: Prototypes in AWS demonstrated scalable event-driven processing and gave the architecture group a validated model for transformation.
- Breaking silos: Introduced cross-functional, empowered ways of working that laid the foundations for long-term agility.
Key impacts
- Prototype microservices demonstrated continuous, event-driven processing at scale
- Manual testing reduced from >90% to ~50% through BDD-led automation
- New domain events delivered real-time monitoring and alerting
- Whitepaper and prototypes provided a roadmap for modernisation adopted by technical leadership
Conclusion
Albany Beck helped one of the world’s largest payments providers prove that the future of payments could be continuous, scalable, and cloud-native. We stabilised today’s services, automated inefficient practices, and delivered prototypes that showed how a future-ready backbone could look.
By combining technical innovation with new ways of working, we gave leadership the confidence and the blueprint to move beyond legacy limits and towards an architecture capable of supporting growth, innovation, and resilience at scale.
If your organisation is constrained by legacy systems, get in touch to explore how we can help you build the future while keeping today on track.
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