Allpay gains transaction visibility with ITRS Uptrends
What’s better than cash? What is safer, easier to pay your rent with and monitor/budget with? Digital payments.
Payments services have come a long way in the past few years, and the market is growing exponentially. Spurred on by ecommerce during – and after - the pandemic, the digital payments market (valued at $7.36 trillion in 2021), is expected to reach over $15 trillion by 2027.
Competition is fierce, so payments providers suffer if there is downtime, therefore it is imperative they can process payments quickly and without interruption.
allpay: Reducing downtime
allpay, a UK-based fintech company, processes nearly £8.5 billion worth of payments for around 4.5 million customers — and it’s still growing. For allpay, processing payments reliably is even more important than beating the competition. A market leader in payment services, allpay provides a range of payment channels to more than 50% of UK local authorities and 90% of the UK’s top 200 housing associations. Its customers can pay bills and more from the comfort of their homes or while out and about using mobile platforms.
In addition, allpay has Mastercard accreditation, which enables it to manufacture chip implants, personalize and distribute Mastercard chip, and PIN card products for several customers — all of which require advance monitoring strategies.
Daniel Sullivan, Senior Application Support Analyst at allpay, noted that to mitigate revenue-killing downtime, allpay needed to deploy reliable transaction monitors allowing them to mimic what clients and customers do when they make or receive payments. “Knowing what your customers are doing in real time is priceless,” said Daniel.
Customers demand precision and speed when it comes to payments, so mistakes are a big problem, creating a cascading effect that can make the customer journey difficult.
Daniel said: “At the end of the day, that will lead to lost revenue, which no company wants to have.”
Monitoring systems with ITRS Uptrends
allpay turned to ITRS Uptrends to provide monitoring tools to help identify whether any issues are location-based or not. Knowing if problems are occurring locally or system-wide is key to mitigating them quickly. To that end, Uptrends offers performance checks from over 230 worldwide locations — one of Uptrends' features that allpay required. Also, because Uptrends provides an independent external view of allpay’s entire IT estate, replicating what customers see.
The complexity of its multi-tiered websites and the constant changes to allpay’s website functionality causes its transaction scripts to require constant monitoring to evolve with organizational needs. allpay’s team can now quickly make script updates directly in the application or automate updates using Uptrends' API. Uptrends helped allpay gain transparency into its monitoring strategy by pointing out that not all transactions are built the same. This called for a deeper understanding of transaction pathways and customer solutions so that, when problems do arise, allpay can identify problems and deploy solutions rapidly and best suited for customer needs.
“The transaction monitors allow us to mimic what our clients and customers do to make or take a payment. Rather than a single page monitor, it allows us to monitor the customer journey with alerting set up, so it notifies us on the exact stage of the process that isn’t working as expected — instead of a single page monitor, which obviously only monitors a single page step.”
Conclusion
Uptrends’ monitoring has been instrumental in reducing profit-eating downtime, allowing allpay to adhere to any service-level agreements (SLA’s) that they have with their clients, operational-level agreements (OLA’s) set within internal departments, and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) they set for themselves and that they are reached each month. A reliable payment service can’t afford to have any major outages or any faulty transaction systems, especially when users are depending on the service to be working all of the time.
Uptrends’ Synthetic Monitoring, and specifically, Web Application Monitoring allows vendors in the fintech industry like allpay to reduce the amount of downtime their websites experience, which has a direct correlation to their mission of providing a positive user experience for clients and customers alike.
You can watch the webinar here.
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