We’ve all had our fair share of projects that ran a bit behind schedule — or even a lot. But when payments specialist AVEM moved to digitize paper-based processes with Axway, they ended up finishing the deployment of their API platform two months ahead of schedule!
Shifting to digital processes for digital payments
The France-based payments company serves more than 500,000 retailers, managing more than 440,000 payment terminals.
“When one of our banking clients sells a payments solution to a retailer, they engage us to deliver and maintain the physical payments systems, and to manage the payments and reconciliation process,” explained Farid Latti, Architecture and Security Manager at AVEM.
Being able to digitize what used to be paper-based workflows was a significant time and cost savings. In the past, for example, retailers needed to use paper forms to order consumables such as ink and paper for their payment terminals.
Now, AVEM has improved the visibility and management of payments contracts by redesigning each stage of the workflow as separate microservices, which communicate via RESTful APIs.
Thanks to Axway’s Amplify API Management Platform, AVEM can create, publish, deploy, and scale APIs securely and cost-effectively, improving the experience for banks’ retail customers.
“Our work with Axway is making it easier than ever for our clients to consume our payments processing services,” added Latti.
Seizing the opportunity to scale for growth
But AVEM took things a step further: rather than developing a one-off solution for each client, their teams saw an opportunity to reuse API-enabled architectures and streamline client onboarding.
In the past, onboarding a new banking client could take the better part of a year. AVEM’s teams would have to build, configure, and test numerous data integrations between its own payments platform and the acquiring bank’s core systems.
The difference is dramatic
AVEM now manages microservices with Amplify, cutting the time required to onboard a new acquiring bank to as little as about a month — a 90 percent reduction. The company can also make changes to its business systems with far greater agility.
“For example, if we decided to change our back-office solutions to a new provider, all we’d need to do is redirect our APIs — our clients wouldn’t need to make any configuration changes at all,” added Latti.
The shift is already bearing fruits for AVEM, which will be able to put its reusable architecture to the test: the company’s parent group, Crédit Agricole, has engaged AVEM to move its payment services to Amplify.
What’s next: event-driven APIs
AVEM is now exploring Axway Amplify Streams, an event-driven API capability in Amplify API Management Platform which adds a Kafka-based event hub in front of AVEM’s existing infrastructure.
“Looking ahead, we’re excited to explore further use cases for APIs in other parts of our business — and with Amplify, we have the platform we need to support our long-term digital transformation vision,” concluded Latti.
Stay tuned to learn more about how Amplify Streams is enabling merchants to request contract changes more easily, allowing AVEM to action the changes faster than ever.
Learn how to catalog, manage, and secure events like APIs in our thought-provoking white paper.