In 2019, Enfuce and OpenWay jointly won a PayTech Award as “Best Payments Solution for Payment Systems in the Cloud”. Below, is a case study by OpenWay that explains how cloud-based solutions are breaking down business obstacles and enabling new profit opportunities worldwide for both fintech startups and established financial institutions.
Meet customer expectations through smart partnerships
The gap between what customers expect and what financial institutions are able to provide is growing ever wider. Worldwide, customers are spoiled with choice, used to personalised experiences and relevant content delivered by big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook. So today’s financial services need to be exceptionally agile to be perceived as new and exciting. They also have to be built around compliance with global financial legislation. The payment ecosystem is evolving beyond the ability of many companies to keep up on their own.
Smart banks and payment processors are bridging the gap by building partnerships with innovative companies who take on the role of flexible collaborators. Take Enfuce, for example. Our rapid growth from startup to global provider of cloud-based payment services was made possible through partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenWay, a global vendor of digital payment solutions. By running OpenWay’s Way4 payments software platform in the cloud, they provide their clients with a broad range of integrated card schemes and practically every card product available on the market, whether they are pre-paid, debit, credit, or instalments.
Harness the advantages of a fully-scalable, cloud-based payment card solution
For those considering a cloud-based business model, a clear advantage is fast time-to-market and onboarding. These are now at speeds that were considered unachievable until recently. With the Way4 platform, fintech start-ups can get results in days instead of the usual years. Enfuce boasts results that might be called “3-3-3”. In 3 minutes, they enabled a bank to offer a full digital onboarding process to its customers so they can make high-value payments. In just 3 hours, five million cards were migrated from a legacy platform to Enfuce’s, and in just 3 months, Apple Pay was implemented at a large issuer for the first time in its native country of Finland. Other impressive statistics? Enfuce can connect clients to a fully scalable, innovative card issuing service within a week and ensure 99.99% service availability.
Compliance is a key value for both Enfuce and OpenWay. Enfuce solutions ensure compliance with the latest global regulatory standards: PCI DSS, FSA, GDPR, and PSD2. Another requirement of being in a public cloud is high-level security. Public cloud services such as AWS are known for the immense funds they spend to secure their global infrastructure. Cloud-based technology enables Enfuce to provide highly secure services: Payment services and open banking through standardized and integrated APIs.
Save costs, even with legacy infrastructure
Cloud-native companies like Enfuce are thriving by leveraging the advantages of cloud services. But is a cloud-based solution a realistic option for companies who have a legacy infrastructure in place? According to Gartner, for those moving an existing infrastructure to the cloud, costs increase potentially up to three times before they start making savings at year 2 or year 3.
One way of resolving this is to make sure the cloud pays for itself by generating more revenue. The new products and services implemented in the cloud will create more value and bring more clients, which means scaling up. The goal is to set up a cloud environment that is meeting its own costs. Once that is achieved, companies can start on migration and remove or reduce other costs on the market.
The second strategy is to make the most of the cloud’s scalability. The ability to take capacity on demand, to scale up the amount of processing you need, and to scale it down when you don’t – these are cost-cutting advantages over a data center with idling hardware. To illustrate, Enfuce operates test and stage environments according to business need. They can be shut down for the night and activated again in the morning. By optimizing the use of test and stage environments, they achieve cost savings of 10-30 percent.
Read the full case study or the previous press release about OpenWay’s collaboration with Enfuce.
