INDUSTRY
Financial Services
SERVICES
.NET Application Development
Integration Services
Key Takeaways
”"[Mantel Group] were a key element to the successful launch for Opy into the USA market and I would be thrilled to work with them again on future projects."
Ryk NeethlingHead of Engineering
Company Overview
Openpay Group Ltd (ASX: OPY) is a fast-growing and highly differentiated player in the global ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) payment solutions market.
Openpay provides services to payment processors, merchants, and their customers in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and in the United States, where it operates under the brand name Opy. Openpay differentiates itself from the common BNPL brands by offering the most flexible plans in the market with plan lengths up to 24 months and values of up to $20,000.
Openpay Group has seen mass growth over the past few years, including achieving 2.1 million active plans; a 130% increase compared to the previous financial year. Openpay’s USA expansion has added ambitious growth plans over the next few years.
The customer challenge
Openpay Group Ltd sought to grow its business significantly by entering the $5.5 trillion US market by October 2021. In order to do this, Opy needed to switch their existing payment gateway to Worldpay (part of FIS) in time for their October 2021 launch. Worldpay provides payments services for internet retailers and mail order, in addition to point of sale (PoS) transactions.
The core of the challenge lay in integrating Opy’s products with the payment provider operated by Worldpay, in order to allow Opy merchants in the USA to offer Openpay products quickly and seamlessly to the end consumer. Opy required a credible partner to complement the current .NET engineering skills, capabilities, and agile practices to accelerate the delivery of the integration.
After meeting with Mantel Group, Opy was confident that both the engineering capability and the personalities within the team would take accountability for delivering a first-class solution despite a significant level of ambiguity going into the engagement with business and integration requirements still being identified. The Azenix team also brought a wealth of prior experience from previous projects in the financial services industry and specifically, payment integration projects. All of which was key to ensure success on this strategic project to support their US launch.
Our approach
Mantel Group operated as if they were an extension to the Opy business by embedding themselves within the various Opy teams. Mantel Group worked closely with the Opy product owner responsible for the stream of work and the Head of Engineering, given the strategic importance of the project. The team also worked collaboratively with Worldpay’s integration team and Opy’s QA team lead with open communication daily to ensure speed of delivery. Agility and accountability from the Mantel Group Azure team would be pivotal.
Secondly, Opy and Mantel Group were required to have open communication channels between the engineers and the product owners, and due to the sensitive nature of the implementation the team could not rely on documentation alone but had to dive into existing code to ensure that parity was achieved in the new implementation.
One of the main challenges for the Mantel Group team and Opy was the topic of refunds and the overcoming of technical differences in integrating the FIS refund mechanism into the existing platform. The Mantel Group team was instrumental in identifying a solution for processing the refunds which led to an improved end-customer experience.
At the end of the initial engagement Opy saw the value of extending the agreement with Mantel Group to assist in completing related work on the payment integration.
Results and Benefits
Mantel Group was entrusted with delivering and supporting Opy in a key strategic initiative for the business. Merchants using Worldpay can now use Opy’s product offerings, whilst Worldpay is now Opy’s merchant acquirer in the United States. With the project being delivered under time, it meant that substantial savings could be realised for the Opy team on this crucial US integration.
Opy’s products now efficiently integrate into the payment gateway operated by Worldpay from FIS, enabling the availability of Opy’s products to FIS’ merchants quickly and seamlessly. Given there are over a million FIS merchants worldwide, this enables OpenPay to offer their awesome product to a huge new customer base.
Openpay has now achieved a milestone moment in the history of the business, particularly, substantial progress in OPY USA’s ongoing efforts to deploy 6 strategic pillars, offering a differentiated BNPL platform via a large-scale and sustainable ecosystem through partnerships with payments processors, banks and a large on-line marketplace.
”"At Opy, we were under a lean timeframe, and we wanted to ensure the development capacity to launch into the USA was as seamless as possible. We approached [Mantel Group] for help and within a week, they mobilised a team and were active on the project.
The reason we chose [Mantel Group] was because we needed a team that could function autonomously and solve the complex puzzle, collaborating across several teams on a shared code basis, with the added challenge of dealing with multiple unknowns. This was a very complicated brief with complex integrations to various systems and providers. I couldn’t have asked for a better team of experts to take on the project.
The [Mantel Group] team executed the project with great aplomb; they picked up the work very swiftly and collaborated with Opy’s product and engineering teams flawlessly. [Mantel Group] completed the project well within the estimated timeframe and budget which exceeded our expectations.
[Mantel Group] brought technical expertise, leadership, and an exemplary team that collaborated and communicated impeccably. [Mantel Group] was a key element to the successful launch for Opy into the USA market and I would be thrilled to work with them again on future projects.
Ryk NeethlingHead of Engineering
