As more companies opt for the remote working modes, it is challenging for them to manage their operations in an environment that was not designed for a distributed workforce. According to the Microsoft and BCG research study, only 30% of remote-working managers find their companies innovating in areas like product development and customer experience.

At the same time, companies in areas like payment also face additional challenges of adhering to compliance requirements, security vulnerabilities, and quality standards.

To work effectively, organizations are adopting the DevOps model for their hybrid infrastructure (comprising both on-premises and cloud platforms). With increasing digital payment platforms, payment companies can no longer rely on “traditional” legacy systems to drive the next wave of innovations.

With mobile-based payments expected to touch nearly 1.35 billion people by 2022, there is a growing need to prioritize faster and reliable application development in the payments industry. This is where integrated DevOps is set to play a transformational role in modernizing the payment infrastructure.

Why is the DevOps approach critical for innovations in the payments space? Let us explore.

3 areas where DevOps can transform payments

In today’s age, payment companies must focus on rapid innovation and continue to offer new products (or services) to their customers. Effectively, DevOps offers an efficient approach towards product development and testing.

Here are 3 payment-related areas that DevOps can transform in the coming years:

1. Continuous deployment

Continuous deployment of payment-related products is the “mantra” for any DevOps implementation. This enables technology teams to move quickly and adapt to changing market needs. For instance, every product code change goes through automatic testing at every stage of the application development process.

Further, as DevOps leverages the power of automation, the final application deployment can be automated while adhering to quality standards. Faster deployment eliminates manual procedures and speeds up the “time to market” for payment companies.

• Cloud-based containerization

Effectively, containerization will play a significant role in payment companies looking for high reliability, usability, and portability in their payment infrastructure. With their stateless design, DevOps containerization ensures consistency on diverse platforms.

Further, application developers can easily package their applications (along with dependencies) into a lightweight container. This enables faster and secure application deployments, thus reducing the time spent on existing products.

• Automated testing

By integrating quality controls across the application development process, payment companies ensure that each deployed product version is operating at a higher level, thus delivering better customer trust.

On its part, automated DevOps testing adds value through continuous product improvements without a long waiting period. With a test automation framework, payment companies can achieve higher productivity at lower implementation costs.

Why is it imperative for finance and payment companies to adopt the DevOps culture? Let us discuss this in the next section.

How adopting the DevOps culture can benefit payment companies

Jonathan Smart of Barclay talks about the DevOps culture as a “better way of working” and reducing risks while improving quality. In the financial and payment sector, DevOps is the way for companies to remove organizational silos and bring in automation that can improve their visibility and control over their business processes.

Here are 5 primary reasons for payment companies to adopt the DevOps culture:

• Speed to market

Speed is among the primary benefits of adopting the DevOps model. Through frequent product releases, payment customers can leverage innovative product features to their advantage. Besides that, DevOps teams have more visibility over real-time performance to measure the impact of application changes. Through constant monitoring of the product lifecycle, teams now require lesser time to detect and fix any application bugs or issues.

Further, automated integration and testing in any DevOps environment can also speed up product deliveries.

• Team collaboration

Team collaboration is one “missing” element in traditional application development methodologies. What needs to be understood is that DevOps does not simply integrate “development” with “operations” but also connects other business functions like quality testing and application security to the project pipeline.

Effectively, collaboration is all about “building a bridge” and focusing on the combined output instead of individual goals.

• Application modernization

The concept of digital banking or payment has existed for a long time, but not the underlying technology. With evolving technology, it is not feasible for finance companies to “throw out” their legacy systems and replace them with modernized systems.

This is where DevOps is making a profound difference. It enables companies to gradually modernize their existing systems without jeopardizing their business operations. Through continuous development and integration, DevOps enables the “modernization” journey down the line by incorporating the emerging trends.

• High-quality products

In a competitive payments industry, a quality product is always valuable and can provide a competitive edge to its company. DevOps provides a distinct advantage by shortening the product development cycle and enabling early detection of problems in the application code and infrastructure.

Among the key performance metrics, resolution time (with product troubleshooting and bug fixes) can be drastically reduced by DevOps teams.

For instance, an insight-based independent testing approach can streamline the entire testing process, instead of focusing on any individual part of the software lifecycle.

• Efficiency through automation

Among the best practices in the DevOps model, automation tools and platforms can standardize product deployment, thus freeing IT personnel from manual or repetitive tasks.

For instance, a cloud-powered payments infrastructure can accelerate application testing and deployment, while the continuous delivery workflows help with frequent product releases. Powered by automated bots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can also improve process efficiency by automating all (or some) of the repetitive tasks.

Conclusion

With the innovative DevOps model, payment companies can cope with the disruptions caused in the post-pandemic world. As remote and hybrid teams become more adept at this working model, financial companies will need the flexibility and scalability of DevOps to innovate their offerings.

With its focus on the banking and payments industry, Verinite is one technology company that is unlocking business value for its customers in the areas of next-gen application development, testing, and automation. Want to know more? Get in touch with us.