Building An On-demand Infrastructure For Payment Processing

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Merchants and financial institutions are both under increased pressure to meet dynamic demand in real-time in the age of instant gratification. The key is to create an on-demand payment processing infrastructure.

Prior to COVID-19, many financial institutions (FIs) and other online payment gateway organizations were hesitant to dive headfirst into digitization initiatives. Many financial institutions are reconsidering their priorities now that we are witnessing the full force of this pandemic and its impact on business and payments. The analog impediments that could previously be ignored are now on full display as remote work and digital payments become the new normal.

Any hesitancy or resistance to public clouds as on-demand infrastructures for payment processing has weakened as the need for speed and the ability to meet the needs of the modern customer has become clear. There is no denying that digital payments have become a mainstream preference for consumers, with a 209 % increase in online retail sales in April alone year over year. It doesn't stop there; as cash flow and supply chain issues emerge, B2B payments ...
... operations are also being scrutinized. As a result, there is a clear need to scale up quickly and be able to process large volumes of transactions without worrying about capacity or control issues. Fortunately, the cloud can meet all of these requirements and more.

Matching Dynamic Demand
Consumers today want a simple, streamlined, and secure payment experience, whether they're making an online purchase or dealing with their bank. Unfortunately, the dynamic variables of serving customers online can sometimes impede the payment experience. On the retail side, busy shopping holidays (such as Black Friday) can be taxing on on-premise servers, which are not easily scaled to meet rising demand during peak times. Banks and other financial institutions are in a similar predicament. Banks that serve customers online face peak demand periods (think every other week payday), which necessitate the ability to scale computing capacity to adequately handle that demand while providing an optimized customer experience.

In both cases, merchants and financial institutions that are not adequately prepared to handle dynamic demand and scale quickly will fall behind more agile competitors. Customers have lost patience with waiting in lines, even if they are virtual.

The dynamic demand problem is more easily solved with a cloud-based infrastructure that can be scaled up and down as demand fluctuates. Customers are not left waiting in line because of the ability to scale quickly. In contrast to on-premise infrastructure, which is extremely difficult to scale, the cloud's on-demand nature makes it simple and cost-effective to adjust infrastructure as needed. It necessitates (accurate) forecasts of how and when demand will spike, as well as costly hardware investments that may only be relevant for a short period of time.

Building on-demand cloud infrastructure makes sense for truly customer-centric businesses because it is the only way to meet customers' needs without hiccups. It is a more efficient and cost-effective method of avoiding the ongoing IT pain point of matching infrastructure to current needs. Moving to the cloud increases the capacity of businesses and banks to meet demand.

Technology That Supports Scalability
Scalability is the solution to dynamic demand, and it necessitates an infrastructure that can respond to fluctuations in demand in real time. In-memory processing and distributed cloud architectures enable this, particularly with processing speeds orders of magnitude faster than a database and instant load balancing. Organizations can eliminate payment processing delays through the best online payment gateway rather than being reactive and losing frustrated customers to competitors.

Revenue-critical applications can quickly retrieve information from in-memory caches rather than making the long, arduous journey across the network to a database by leveraging a new computing stack. As a result, RAM-speed transactions are enabled by both streaming and stored data, as well as algorithms that can detect fraudulent activity quickly. These processes can run in the cloud at sub-millisecond speeds and automatically adjust to changes in demand.

The End Game
As new entrants flood the financial services and ecommerce space, armed with disruptive technology, incumbents must embrace digital transformation and leverage agile cloud technology to remain competitive and grow.

Using cloud technology to leverage on-demand infrastructure enables these organizations to scale, innovate, and go to market with improved, customer-centric products and services more quickly. This consumption model frees up IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives that help the core business grow and differentiate itself from an increasing number of competitors.