Modernising legacy payment solutions for a market-leading payment services provider

The Client

Our client is a market leader of payment services within the UK public and social housing sector, providing a range of payment channels to more than 50% of UK local authorities and 90% of the UK’s top 200 housing associations.

Established in 1994, our client now handle £8.5 billion, serving over 4.5 million end customers.

The Challenge

Over a number of years our client has developed a very sophisticated direct debit application which is at the heart of their payments business.

The client recognised the need to modernise the application to improve scalability, allowing it to increase the number of transactions it can process, to support its plans to grow the business and enable expansion into new markets.

Plans to migrate the direct debit application from on-premise to Azure Cloud as-is were already in place. The approach to ‘lift and shift’ the application would however; result in a less reliable cloud application compared to its on-premise counterpart.

TXP were engaged to refactor the application to ensure it runs effectively in the cloud and is able to benefit from flexible scalability that cloud offers.

The Solution

TXP conducted a migration discovery and assessment to outline the best approach. A migration plan was developed detailing the tooling to be used.

The TXP team incorporating Azure architects, DevOps engineers, developers and QAs completed the :

• re-architecture of prioritised features.
• migration of the workloads to Azure cloud using Azure DevOps into Kubernetes containers.
• post-migration optimisation of features
• post-migration application modernisation

Automated testing was completed using TXP collateral, aligned to our client’s test automation framework, ensuring that agreed performance targets were met.

The Benefits

TXP completed the application modernisation of the direct debit application and the client now benefits from:

• a new cloud-based application that performs as effectively as their on-premise version;
• an application that can be easily scaled to meet increases in transaction volume;
• improved agility as the direct debit system that was part of the complex legacy system, is now separated into its own discrete application making it easier to maintain and develop;
• the move to cloud has made the application significantly easier to deploy than its on-premise equivalent;
• the cloud application is more resource efficient compared to the on-premise version.

TXP continue to work with the client to modernise their legacy applications.