Interview

Payment stack modernisation: choosing the right POP

Wednesday 18 December 2024 10:33 CET | Editor: Irina Ionescu | Interview

We interviewed David Jelley, Head of Product Management at CellPoint Digital, about payment stack modernisation and the role of modern technologies in building resilient payment operations.

The critical components of a modern enterprise payment stack, and how do they differ from legacy infrastructure?

Traditional software infrastructure has moved well away from centralisation and mainframe, but even the transition to cloud-based solutions is evolving. The key to a strong platform is a strong foundation. Any technology provider must construct a strong foundation to develop on top of and ensure scalability and reliability. There is a fine balance between defining your own intellectual property while not reinventing the wheel. 

In this context, it's important to use standardised, well-designed tools and libraries from external sources in conjunction with our own intellectual properties. Not only is our platform designed in an intuitive way, but it's built on common tools which allows CellPoint Digital to expand resources seamlessly. It also supports rapid onboarding of new developers efficiently as the platform is built on industry standards and is constantly updated to maintain these ever-evolving standards.

How are enterprises balancing the demand for frictionless payments with increasing security threats and regulatory requirements?

As a payment orchestration platform (POP), CellPoint must balance frictionless payments and security. This is a challenging goal, especially at a global scale. CellPoint has defined rules and logic that automatically calculate regulatory requirements against cost-optimised routing/processing. While many gateways today use basic routing rules to meet these requirements, they don't spend the necessary time understanding individual transactions.

One of CellPoint's core values is determining, on a per-transaction level, the most cost-effective path to acceptance. Making our routing rules more dynamic and contextual is how we balance this and drive lower costs and increased revenue for our clients. We also acknowledge that, often enough, the context of a transaction or the optimised route can change; to accommodate this, we introduced machine learning (ML) to adapt our routing strategy and continuously improve this balance. We plan to build and expand on this further to be as competitive as possible.

 

What role do emerging technologies like AI and APIs play in building resilient payment operations?

Machine learning represents the key driver of resilient payment operations. We have already begun strong utilisation of ML and will continue to position it alongside intuitive APIs to streamline integration and utilisation of internal platforms and services. Part of our platform evolution includes a key focus on emerging technologies and continuous platform evolution to remain competitive. We strive to assess emerging technologies to determine their value for integration within our platform. Just like balancing frictionless guest checkout experiences against compliance, we also need to balance emerging technologies with resilient systems.

How should enterprises approach payment stack modernisation — through gradual evolution or complete transformation?

How enterprises approach stack modernisation is difficult to provide a ‘correct’ response to. The decision making must begin with an assessment of your current enterprise stack. This is not unique to payments and represents a major undertaking for any software modernisation. As mentioned previously, the stack can only be as strong as its foundation. Here at CellPoint, we have performed a joint exercise where we allocated time to modernise the foundation of our platform while also building a complete transformation alongside it. 

This is critically important as, if an enterprise decides to completely transform, they must also consider how data and existing services/volume will transition. Modernising, even partially, the existing stack is critical to ensure continuous stability while also creating an environment that supports an enhanced transaction flow leading to a complete transformation. 

Overall, we do not consider gradual evolution vs. complete transformation as a decision point, but instead as two paths that converge at the final result. This approach can be costly and time consuming, but could also provide the most stable and seamless transition for existing and new client bases, maintaining CellPoint's client-focused goals while also managing our long-term positioning within the market.



About David Jelley

David takes pride in solving problems and finding solutions. Utilising his years of experience working for Amadeus and Worldpay, he strives to provide the most complete yet concise solutions for our customers. Based in Boston, he continues to push the boundaries of Payments.




About CellPoint Digital

CellPoint Digital, the inventor and leader of Payment Orchestration, is a pioneer in shaping the future of payments, with a focus on the airline and travel industry, using it’s cutting-edge Payment Orchestration Platform to enable customers to cut costs and grow revenues by streamlining payments between borders and using different payment methods – making payments work for them across all channels and markets.


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Keywords: online payments, payments , payments orchestration, machine learning, Smart Routing, API, payment processing, optimi
Categories: Payments & Commerce
Companies: Cellpoint Digital
Countries: World
This article is part of category

Payments & Commerce

Cellpoint Digital

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