Payments Company Boosts Operational Efficiency With Diagnostics Solution

About Citrus Pay

Citrus Pay makes digital payments and online checkout processes simple, fast, safe and easy for an 800 million strong electronically connected user base. Conceived in 2011, Citrus Pay has 10 million+ customers.

Project Objectives

Citrus Pay needed a collaboration partner to help analyze its cloud business, identify problems, propose plans to improve operational performance, and rapidly implement working solutions. Because Citrus Pay operates in the financial services vertical market, performance failure results in lost revenue.

After thorough research, Citrus Pay selected REAN Cloud, now part of Hitachi Vantara, to help address its mission-critical issues. Accredited with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Financial Services Competency, the chosen company proposed that Citrus Pay use AWS Cloud for dynamically creating performance labs using the Test function of REAN Accelerator Platform from Hitachi Vantara.

The Challenges

To best serve its customers, Citrus Pay had an objective for success-rate-optimization, which it implements periodically to improve business efficiencies. Despite regular and consistent process improvement practices, the success rate was still below the high standards the business was striving for. Because Citrus Pay was unable to achieve exceptional performance levels, it experienced mild customer dissatisfaction. In the financial services business, this can quickly result in lost revenues. Additionally, Citrus Pay needed to simplify its business logic. A thorough analysis was required for desktop and mobile platforms, as well as the data being processed by payment gateways.

The Citrus Pay environment experienced millions of users making bill payments via the company’s payment gateway (see Figure 1). Users went through the billing portal successfully, but when routed to the payment gateway, at times, they were unable to process the payments, which led to transaction failures.

The losses in transactions were having a significant financial impact on the company’s bottom line. Citrus Pay was not only losing real revenue but it was also seeing a negative impact on its loyal customer base. The company was unable to identify the root cause of the problem and was looking for a prompt solution.

The Solution

REAN Cloud, now part of Hitachi Vantara, is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with AWS Financial Services Competency and AWS DevOps Competency. As such, it was the perfect partner to help fix and improve the business problems Citrus Pay was experiencing.

The engineering team from REAN Cloud (now Hitachi Vantara) monitored the user experience by spinning up hundreds of automated users for browser-based testing in an agile deployment infrastructure. Monitoring systems were put in place to receive continuous performance feedback. Any change in business performance was immediately identified. Thorough analysis of the code and business logic was carried out automatically and then subsequently by on-site developers. Static code analysis tools were deployed as necessary and where required. Load infrastructure and mock banks were set up to detect server spikes.

The engineers used the Test function of REAN Accelerator Platform from Hitachi Vantara to perform a simple URL test of Citrus Pay’s application. All browser versions (including latest and old) were selected and submitted for the test. Surprisingly, the Test function revealed that a new Google Chrome browser version had been released, and Citrus Pay’s testing team was unaware of this. The testing team had not tested all new Chrome browser releases and thus was unaware of its new and more complex security aspects. The engineers used diagnostic tools to quickly identify the problem, saving time and money. Additionally, they found that the PAY button was not visible because of the latest security enhancements made in Chrome, which led to the incomplete transactions and failures.

The Results and Benefits

The Test function of REAN Accelerator Platform from Hitachi Vantara allowed the engineering team to create a dynamic test infrastructure within a few hours. This approach included all versions of browsers installed. It ran a simple URL test and analyzed the results quickly, which lead the team to identify the root cause of Citrus Pay’s problem. With this solution, Citrus Pay staff gained:

• An understanding of the data they were was collecting and the immediate ability to detect issues and loopholes.
• An immediate increase in the success rate, by fixing all the glaring problems across various tiers of their application.
• Eventual reduction in forward failure rates.

Citrus Pay now operates with greater confidence and delivers a higher quality of service to its customers. The solution has improved Citrus Pay’s operational efficiencies as well as service delivery, and has resulted in greater revenues and higher customer retention rates for Citrus Pay.

For more information about how REAN Cloud, now part of Hitachi Vantara, can help your business be more agile, innovative and cost effective, contact your Hitachi Vantara representative or visit HitachiVantara.com.