Global Card Processing: Getting the Abstraction Right

Microservices is often an efficient way to scale product organizations. While this idea is widely accepted – we know that in practice, this is a challenging path to take and often, quite hard to get right in the first attempt. It boils down to getting these two things right – architecture and service abstraction. Any decisions pertaining to these are highly consequential and have a long-ranging impact.

The talk starts with setting up a context – how card transactions work behind the scenes and our initial architecture for card transactions that had not evolved since its startup days. Then it dives into the need to change – faster launch in newer markets to become a global bank, increasing availability and scalability requirements – and how these requirements shaped the final design to build a scalable, region agnostic, global card transaction component. The talk also expands in detail on the tools and techniques used to achieve – data consistency across systems, iterative releases, and minimal impact on user experience.