Case Study
Cloud-native application modernization of fintech’s payment processing systems reduced TCO by 50%
CLIENT
This U.S.-based financial technology (fintech) company provides payment processing services for credit and debit cards as well as digital and contactless payments. The company has partnered with more than 1,000 financial institutions and serves approximately 4,000 merchant accounts across 100+ industries.
CHALLENGE
Legacy system upgrade: Need to streamline application support, reduce costs, and gain agility
The company’s core payment processing systems were in multiple aging mainframe systems with a massive, monolithic code base of over 100 million bits of code. The IT team had trouble finding cost-effective support staff to maintain the application. Processing speeds were slow because of high MIPS, or million instructions per second, that were growing at a rate of 20-25%.
To compound the situation, the IT team had to hard code client-specific business rules, making the code base even more unmanageable. The inflexible, monolithic applications prevented the IT team from rolling out new features and functionality to keep pace with changing business needs. To resolve these challenges, the IT team wanted to transform the payment processing systems into a flexible, cloud-native application.
TRANSFORMATION
Seamless mainframe-to-cloud migration thanks to modernization roadmap development
Following a meticulous roadmap, UST transformed the legacy mainframe systems into a cloud-based application with a microservices architecture in an AWS Cloud environment. The plan consisted of:
- Breaking the massive project into three manageable streams—Processes were upgraded as batch functions, online event processing transactions and fault tolerant HP NonStop processes.
- Reverse engineering the application—We used a microfocus analyzer to reverse engineer the application and create stories, accelerating development work to build business and functional unified modeling language (UML) models of the application.
- Designing a new rules engine—By externalizing client-specific business rules in the new, more flexible rules engine, the application could better support each client’s unique needs.
- Migrating data to the new AWS Cloud application—We used an SQDATA integration layer and a data fabric layer to transfer data from the mainframe systems to the new, target database.
Once the new AWS Cloud-based payment processing application was deployed, the company didn’t need expensive mainframe support staff, and the system consumed cloud computing resources much more efficiently than the previous mainframe systems. The microservices architecture provided flexibility and scalability to roll out new features and functionality much more rapidly to meet customer demands, and customers could choose the payment processing products that best suited their needs rather than buying a full suite of bundled products they may not have needed.
IMPACT
TCO slashed in half, new-customer onboarding 10X faster
The IT modernization initiative allowed the fintech company to reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) by approximately 50%. The company can onboard new clients 10X faster than before—with the ability to easily set up client-specific business rules.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/strategy-implementation-operations
https://www.ust.com/en/insights/how-to-leverage-the-cloud-for-leagcy-modernization-and-innovation