Concardis Develops SmartPay To Reduce Onboarding Times to Under 30 Minutes

Payments

Challenge

Concardis wanted to transition away from a time-consuming paper-based onboarding process taking anywhere from one to three weeks. To provide a faster and more efficient solution for SMEs, it needed a reliable partner who could assist it in developing a tailor-made digital product.

Outcome

We helped Concardis create SmartPay, which has helped revolutionise the onboarding process, making it fully automated and reducing it from an average of 10+ days to 30 minutes or less.

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It always pays to improve

As one of Germany’s largest payment companies, Concardis covers some of the DACH market’s biggest merchant accounts along with a variety of the most distinguished small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region. Accordingly, they’re well aware of the technologies and services required to offer fast and secure cashless payment processes for their 120,000+ customers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

In a bid to further improve their services, Concardis wanted to transition away from a time-consuming paper-based onboarding process taking anywhere from one to three weeks. To provide a faster and more efficient solution for SMEs, they needed a reliable partner who could assist them in developing a tailor-made digital product bringing all payment systems and relevant payment processes together on one smart platform.

After a short, minutes-long onboarding process, the solution caters to customers’ payment preferences by giving Concardis’ clients a reliable terminal, the acceptance of cashless, contactless, and mobile payments, as well as the advantages of an online portal and mobile app, in which they can customise and upgrade their packages.

Applying smart solutions right on time

With Endava’s help, Concardis created SmartPay – an SME-specific product letting merchants manage their business' financial aspects through an intuitive merchant portal, which allows them to view all card transactions for terminals and e-commerce transactions, offers easy access to billing and sales data, supplies comprehensive statistics, shows the origin of customers, and contains customisable settings.

They can also utilise the companion mobile app that’s available for iOS and Android, which provides the status of card sales, displays the highest sales frequencies, shows the origin of customers, and provides insights into the proportion of returning customers.

Plus, SmartPay’s self-service option helps eliminate the need for face-to-face interactions, helping save time and effort.

Building with better blueprints

As a key partner, Endava was initially asked to design and build the onboarding platform (based on Salesforce), the merchant portal (.NET and ReactJS), and the companion apps. Our original team consisted of around 10 people focusing only on Salesforce development, but it quickly expanded to about 20 Endavans and has only grown further from there.

With innovation in mind, we used Salesforce as a backend and ReactJS as a frontend for the self-onboarding, which is uncommon in the Salesforce world. Nevertheless, an exceptional delivery was achieved by building an engine of communication between Salesforce and React. We set rendering logic on the backend and actual rendering in React, which allowed full flexibility of development and the ability to fulfill complex UI requirements. Salesforce was only used for the Sales, Know Your Customer, Service, and technical orchestration of onboarding workflows.

Following the outstanding work done by our teams, Concardis asked us to extend and pick up more streams to support them further. A host of UX and UI designers took on the challenge of overhauling the efforts of a previous company to make SmartPay more appealing and user-friendly. Additionally, we successfully transitioned the end-to-end (E2E) testing from another provider, increasing automation and reducing system integration testing (SIT) time from 10+ weeks to three weeks. We also established Application Management (AM) for all our streams, which eventually saw more than 10x improvements on the resolution time.

More recently, when switching to the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) delivery model due to slow speeds and uncertainties in delivery, we onboarded an Agile Coach who provided great support to the teams by successfully guiding them in their adoption of the new interaction model.

We delivered the MVP within six months and continued enriching the platform with new functionality for Concardis’ clients, with subsequent releases on a monthly basis. Our engagement was part of a broader programme that included the development of an Integration Layer and the reshaping of a Processing System for better orchestration of the SmartPay app, onboarding platform, and merchant portal.

Dividing the task to multiply success

The Endava teams are distributed across multiple Delivery Units, with Chisinau handling the portal, mobile apps, E2E testing, and AM, Bucharest focusing on Salesforce and E2E testing, and Iasi working on UX and E2E testing.

Ultimately, the work behind SmartPay is spread throughout several locations and multiple vendors and there has been excellent collaboration onsite and great cooperation among the teams in nearshore sites. At its peak, the SmartPay programme team included roughly 200 people delivering from Germany, Poland, Croatia, Romania, Moldova, and the UK.

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When you grow together with your partner

Prior to SmartPay’s conception, Endava’s successful delivery of a different merchant portal project for Concardis proved they could trust us to help develop their “one-stop-shop” payments product.

Along with our established history working with Concardis, they chose us over several larger service providers due to our technical expertise and cost-effective approach. Our competitive advantage also included our experience with configure, price, and quote (CPQ) software and our overall Salesforce skillset.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

SmartPay has helped revolutionise the onboarding process in Concardis by making it fully automated and reducing it from an average of 10+ days to 30 minutes or less. They can now target the German SME market actively with three sales channels via face-to-face sales, call-centre sales, and a self-onboarding option.

This allows SME merchants to fill in all the required onboarding information much faster than before and start processing the next day. What’s more, we’ve created the option for easily defining and launching specific campaigns for targeted client segments to react quickly to market changes.

Endava’s partnership with Concardis on SmartPay has helped push us to generate one of our most complex CPQ implementations to date, and as Concardis’ choice for their unique Salesforce.com (SFDC) vendor, we look forward to helping them continue to achieve their goal to provide their customers with the best payments experiences possible.

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