Consumer Credit
Card processing platform: powering own-brand credit for major retailers
- Client
- A leading UK consumer-credit provider (name withheld)
- Sector
- Consumer Credit
- Scale
- 5m+ cardholders
Many well-known high-street retailers let their customers spread the cost under the retailer's own brand, but the credit behind it is run entirely by our client. We were brought in to deliver new functionality and support the core services at the heart of the platform that powers it (customer accounts, interest and fees, and the nightly end-of-day cycle), keeping branded credit running reliably at the scale of millions of accounts a day.
Technologies
- .NET
- C#
- Microservices
- Azure
- Cosmos DB
- REST APIs
The challenge
When you buy from a big high-street retailer and choose to pay over time on that retailer's own-branded credit, the retailer's name is on the front, but the credit itself is run behind the scenes by someone else. That someone is our client, a leading UK consumer-credit provider whose business is providing branded credit for some of the country's best-known retailers. Running a regulated credit-card business is complex and far from a retailer's own expertise, so the client handles all of it on its own systems. To do that across many major retail brands and millions of cardholders, it needs a card-processing platform that can run each retailer's credit programme reliably, at enormous scale, and bring new retail partners on board without starting from scratch each time.
Our role
The platform is built as a large estate of more than ninety independent services, each handling one part of the job so it can scale and change on its own. We were brought in to deliver new functionality and support several of the core processing services at the very heart of it, in production.
- The customer accounts. The service that manages every customer's account and its details, the foundation everything else depends on.
- What each customer owes. The services that work out the interest and fees on every account, the calculations that have to be exactly right because they decide what real people are charged.
- The nightly cycle. The end-of-day processing that runs every night to bring every account up to date, across millions of accounts, ready for the next day.
These are the parts of a card platform where money, balances and customer records have to be precisely right, every day, for millions of accounts. Our job is to keep delivering new capability in these areas and to keep these critical systems running reliably at that scale.
The result
Core card processing (customer accounts, interest, fees and the nightly end-of-day cycle) runs at the scale of millions of accounts a day, powering branded credit for some of the UK's best-known retailers. It is high-stakes, high-volume work where accuracy is not optional and new functionality has to land without disturbing systems that are always on, and it is exactly the kind of critical delivery we are trusted with.
