Supporting more than 200 payment methods globally

Fintech payments are an essential component of driving the business success of any e-commerce platform these days. In the recent past, fintech has evolved considerably — from card payments to Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) like net banking, e-wallets, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and more. As per a recent study, APMs in Southeast Asia account for almost 68% of all transactions for the entire market.

Given the rise of APMs, Agoda has been a pioneer in adapting to this evolving trend. We have comprehensive payment coverage that supports over 200 plus global payment methods and successfully executes millions of financial transactions each month. We thrive to design payment systems that are easy to use and provide an enhanced customer experience. That is why our payments are highly localized and based on the market it is serving.

Agoda App Snapshots Of Localized Payment Methods.

Agoda Cashback is one of the latest features introduced to our customers. However, the scale at which Agoda is expanding managing APMs comes with its own set of challenges.

Let's talk about how Agoda supports over 200 payment methods globally.

The Secret Sauce

Swift addition of a customized payment — As the eCommerce business reach grows globally, providing a wide variety of online payment options has become the norm. After closely analyzing every market, the payment team picks up the most used and viable payment methods for integration. Market analysis plays a vital role here as every market has a different pattern and may vary over time. For example, some customer markets use APMs, but some prefer payment via card while others prefer net banking. Our team conducts an aggressive and swift integration of multiple payment methods each year to keep up with varying patterns. This quick addition of customized payments allows customers to pay using various options.

Payment Service Provider (PSP) Performance Experimentation — With the fintech industry's growth, many payment service providers or PSPs have proliferated. Competition now relies on performance and cost. Hence, Agoda partners with several PSPs to provide comprehensive coverage of global prices to stay competitive. Periodic integration of new PSPs and evaluating the same is quite typical in the fintech payments domain. PSP evaluation at Agoda uses the A/B experimentation framework. This framework helps us assess the PSPs performance. There are several benefits of using the A/B experimentation framework. Like:

1. The framework is scalable
2. It can execute experimentation based on dynamic parameters
3. Can function without a single line of code change
4. Automation of the framework provides flexibility
5. The framework permits experiments to run parallelly
6. We can allow simultaneous valuation of various PSPs across the globe.

These benefits enable the payments team to have in-depth clarity about the stability of any new or existing PSPs they wish to evaluate. Finally, the most successful PSP is prioritized based on cost and stability metrics.

Dynamic Routing of PSPs — Several inevitable technical challenges are faced for achieving successful fintech payments repeatedly—for example — network lag during the PSP connections or network outage at PSP location. These uncontrollable factors need to be dealt with to avoid a monetary loss to the business. Agoda payment uses a dynamic routing of PSP mechanism to handle such aspects to prevent financial losses. Are you wondering how automation work?

Let us consider a scenario where Agoda tries to process one booking payment with one PSP. Let's assume there is an unexpected network glitch at a specific time frame. Once the payment system identifies this glitch, the system will pause and monitor the glitchy PSP for a particular configured period and automatically retry the payment processing with another PSP. Eventually, once the glitchy PSP is up and healthy, the paused PSP will auto-resume. This circuit breaker design mechanism helps Agoda achieve stability over these uncontrolled factors. This mechanism is scalable for existing PSPs as well as future PSP integration.

Network Tokenization

Today, network tokenization is an essential fintech feature that every e-commerce business adapts to secure card payments. The tokenization feature emphasizes using a token instead of an actual customer card to process payments with the PSP. Payments via this method are more secure as tokens are merchant-specific and cannot be used with any other merchant online. Agoda has proactively adapted this feature last year and has been processing card payments using tokens across various global markets.

We have witnessed tremendous success and advancement in our payment management by introducing these four steps. Our team members actively engage and brainstorm not just from a developers point of view but also look at situations and scenarios from the customer's point of view. We have proudly set global ease of payment for our customers and business partners in motion.

The team behind this

The tech-savvy payment team at Agoda comprises Product Owners, Dev Managers, IT-Developers, BI-Developers and, Fintech Directors, supported by Agoda's Senior Leadership. One of the critical factors that makes this an efficient team is the people from diverse backgrounds. Our culture of open communication is a significant factor that drives the team to evolve, progress, and achieve many benchmarks periodically.

Here is a quick glimpse of the Agoda payment team's responsibilities

• They develop and maintain scalable payment software products using the latest technologies for serving electronic payments across the globe.
• They partner with numerous global PSPs with innovative fintech technologies and processes.
• They develop and maintain software tools helping PSP performance evaluation and continuous improvisations.
• With periodic additions to payment coverage, the team is always on the front for providing the most efficient payment optimizations.
• The team is responsible for real-time monitoring and alert systems for proficient tracking and incident management across various payment components.
• They also provide a stable and robust DevOps pipeline for packaging, deployment, and monitoring ease.

Are you looking forward to building a career in FinTech? We are always looking for intelligent people to join our growing team. Click the image to explore opportunities.