Transaction portal

Transaction Portal

About the customer
The Interswitch Group is a payment solutions provider that focuses on the African market. Originating in Nigeria, the Interswitch Group provides innovative payment solutions on the African continent for businesses of every size. Their main goal is to actively support Africa’s journey towards a cashless future.

The company handles over 190.000 business transactions per day and has 22,000,000+ Cards activated on the Verve network, the largest domestic card scheme in Africa with 100% payment acceptance in Nigeria and acceptance in over 185 countries globally.

Business need
To develop easily accessible digital solutions catering to the needs of today’s clients and staff members, the Interswitch Group has selected the Mendix low-code platform to build user-friendly applications. One of the solutions the Interswitch Group wanted to optimize with Mendix low-code was the verification process for large financial transactions.

Large banks often contact customer support staff to verify if large transactions have been executed properly. To check this customer support agents had to perform queries in different SQL databases manually. They had to login, cut scripts from one database and then paste them to another database manually.

In total this process consisted of five different steps, a time consuming and error-prone process that could take up to a day’s work. Besides that user roles were not properly defined so all customer support staff had full access to the databases. Since not all customer support staff had proper IT knowledge this sometimes resulted in accidental errors in the databases.

To solve this the Interswitch Group decided to develop one centralized futureproof Data Access Portal to verify large transactions. Support staff had to be able to only view the information they needed to add, so they could save time on manual data entry and accidental errors could be eliminated.

Solution
Bizzomate was assigned to the job by Mendix and built a new centralized transaction portal for the Interswitch Group within 5 weeks. Four development sprints were needed to develop the portal. By involving the business owners ‘the operations’ staff, they quickly got a clear idea of what was needed, so they could quickly start developing the portal.

In building the portal there were two complicating factors. All development sprints took place online which was sometimes challenging due to unstable internet connections. Secondly, the new portal had to be developed on premise in Nigeria. Therefore Bizzomate was dependent on the Interswitch scrum master in Nigeria to deploy new updates to the portal regularly.

Now that the new portal is live, the Interswitch customer support staff can leverage the portal to quickly verify large transactions for clients such as banks and large African corporations that operate via their payment platform. The portal allows the Interswitch staff to login to one central simple and user-friendly portal to verify the amount. Customer support staff can only view what they need to fill in and have no access to other parts of the database. This reduces the risk of errors and simplifies and speeds up the verification process significantly.

Results
The new centralised desktop portal provides the customer support staff with a user-friendly overview of the data they need to fill in to verify large transactions. Logging in to five different databases, or copy pasting scripts from various databases is no longer needed. The verification process now takes no more than two hours, while it used to take up to a day. Advanced knowledge of database systems to verify the transactions is also no longer required.

With the new portal the verification process has improved significantly. The portal now functions as a single source of information for the verification process resulting in improved internal efficiency allowing the Interswitch Group to provide faster customer support.

In the future all steps to verify transactions may be automated, saving the Interswitch Group even more time on the verification process.