Tide

Merchant Enablement Platform

Headquarters

London

Technologies Used

AWS, SQS/SNS, Microservices, Postgres, jOOQ

Domain

Fintech

Tide (Tide Platform Limited) is a UK financial technology company providing mobile-first banking services for small and medium-sized enterprises. It enables businesses to set up a current account and get instant access to various financial services (including automated bookkeeping and integrated invoicing).

Challenges

The legacy system for onboarding a merchant/business was designed a long time back without envisioning the further expansion of Tide’s services.

Solutions

Knoldus helped Tide business to develop and deploy the Merchant acquiring and the payment gateway integration in record time.

Results

Tide Acquiring and Payment Acceptance support members in increasing sales , improving cash flow and removing the risks and costs associated with cash or bank transfers.

Impact

Challenges

The legacy system for onboarding a merchant/business was designed a long time back without envisioning the further expansion of Tide’s services. Hence the data stored proved to be of little to no use during the integration with third-party providers like Adyen. The challenge was to build a network of services from the ground up using the legacy data, which can serve as the brains of the entire network and is absolutely necessary to bring in revenue(commissions on the payments processed) for Tide.

The onboarding process was cumbersome and took weeks to be completed efficiently.

A team of developers at Knoldus designed and developed the above services alongside developers and the product team from Tide in a span of 8 months. This architecture serves as the core of all revenue-generating operations in Tide.

Approach

The primary need was to onboard merchants and process payments quickly so we decided upon using a 3rd party provider Adyen to enable the onboarding of merchants as well as Payment Processing and reconciliation. The solution was designed using the Adapter pattern where we worked on developing an Adapter for Adyen and in the future, if there is a need to integrate with other or additional platforms then that can be done easily.

Solution

When Tide started working on this idea in Feb 2021 with the Knoldus team, there was a very vague idea of all the operations that this service will be responsible for. The team put in efforts and with the correct technical expertise in the given domain, we were successfully able to integrate with the on-boarding of Tide customers with the third-party provider(Adyen) using some of the existing services to transform the legacy data by the end of June.

From July till September, the team worked on enabling the payments using 3DS technology and handling the payouts to Tide Customer accounts as well as the Tide commission for each transaction made.

The Knoldus team used their expertise in AWS, SQS/SNS, PostgreSQL, jOOQ, Java11 to achieve the proposed architecture.

On the data model side, there were going to be linkage of every Spoke with Spokers. There are also linkages between Spoker's following other Spoker's and doing re-spokes. Another major challenge is to keep performance of every api under 100ms.

Onboarding

A Tide member would make a request to the Merchant acquiring service by accepting the terms and conditions. The request trickle down to MAS, which starts collecting data of the said member via several internal services (Account service, User service, Address Service). All this information is aggregated by MAS and is sent to the Adyen adapter for transformation into a format that the third party can understand.

Adyen adapter then tries to onboard the member with the third party(Adyen in this case), takes care of doing the KYC validations performed by Adyen.

Once the onboarding is complete, The tide member can start accepting payments from its customers via Tide mobile/web app.

Payments

Tide member accepts payments by creating invoices/standalone link for its customers. A one-time payment link is shared with customers via email/in-app invoice.

Once the user clicks the payment link and fills out the details, the Adyen adapter processes the payment and submits it to the third party. The result is relayed back to the customer and tide member. Adyen adapter handles all the payouts (Payout policy is T+2 days) done by a third party after removing its fee/commissions etc.

Results

Knoldus helped Tide business to develop and deploy the Merchant acquiring and the payment gateway integration in record time.

Payment Acceptance is a major milestone in building out Tide’s business financial platform for micro and small businesses. Bundling payment acceptance into the business current account gives Tide members faster access to their funds and can use the advanced connectivity between Tide products and services. Integrations between payment acceptance, automated accounting, and cash flow analytics, for example, mean previously complex tasks, and data analytics will be much simpler and more efficient.

Currently, the Acquiring and Payment acceptance platform is rolled out to a limited number of users and enables Tide members to accept payments from customers online, on the go, or at their business premises, via card terminals.

Tide Acquiring and Payment Acceptance support members in increasing sales (through greater payment acceptance), improving cash flow (through quick access to funds), and removing the risks and costs associated with cash or bank transfers.

The onboarding process was cumbersome and took weeks to be completed efficiently.

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