Xpollens is entering a new era with the announcement of its new technological platform for all payment flows.
Xpollens has reached a significant milestone in the evolution of its technological platform. A major new step in its scale-up journey, it is launching its new Core Banking System, marking an enhancement of its embedded finance capabilities.
Scalability and Robustness: The Challenges of the New Core Banking System
The Xpollens team has been preparing for this overhaul for months: the brand-new Core Banking System was inaugurated in April 2024. Hosted in the cloud with a microservices architecture, it offers new advantages: easier to maintain and evolve, and more scalable. It supports the growth of its current clients in terms of traffic and use cases and integrates an even larger customer base. SMEs, corporates, major remitters, fintechs… now have a robust and secure platform to meet their needs.
Our teams designed this new version, leveraging the experience gained with the first version of the platform and feedback from our clients. It goes even further with:
• A design anticipating future platform evolutions, accelerating our clients’ time-to-market.
• Real-time adaptation of our operational capacity, thanks to automation enabled by the cloud and microservices architecture.
• An enhancement of the existing offer with richer and more coherent APIs.
• Increased reliability of operational processes.
“Xpollens aims for unprecedented performance in response time and reliability. The improvement is already visible, with processing time stabilized and reduced by a third. This makes us very confident in the platform’s growing capabilities,” says Mathieu Taberlet, CTO of Xpollens.
Adding to this are the solid fundamentals since Xpollens’ creation: the support of the BPCE Group, the second-largest banking group in France and the leading VISA issuer in continental Europe, and a team of payment experts who know how to guide projects of all kinds.
Under the Hood: APIs and Microservices for a State-of-the-Art Platform
The challenge of this overhaul was to design a state-of-the-art platform in the Banking-as-a-Service market, adhering to best practices in architecture and technology. “One of our proud achievements is having carried out this long-term project while maintaining our agile at scale organization,” adds Simon Roux, CPO of Xpollens.
In addition to APIs, the internal communication system between microservices extends to clients via a notification mechanism (webhooks). “In practice, they are notified in real-time of every event concerning them on the platform: each incoming or outgoing transaction, the status of a KYC, the creation of an account… They can react independently to each event,” comments Mathieu Taberlet, CTO of Xpollens.
Another game-changer: the platform operates with asynchronous event management. This ensures greater reliability:
• Within the platform: thanks to a queuing system that prevents any break in the chain.
• With clients: they can retrieve their notification history at any time.
The next challenge following this evolution is to leverage this new microservices architecture to maximize the concept of “continuous deployment.” The idea is to enable each team to deploy their services independently and securely, with regular deliveries. “Reducing time-to-market not only demonstrates excellent control of our technological assets but also our ability to quickly deliver fixes and new features,” comments Simon Roux, CPO of Xpollens.
Want more details on our tech platform? Check out our dedicated blog post.
Production Launch and First Client on the New Core Banking System: Nirio
3,2,1… ignition!
The teams were ready, and the production launch was anticipated for weeks. Result: a resounding success! Kudos to all the employees who brilliantly executed this implementation.
“Despite the scale of this transformation, it was completely transparent to our clients. Only after a long period of successful testing did we switch off the old platform with confidence,” adds Mathieu. Indeed, for a year, the technical teams worked to set up a Y configuration, allowing both the old and new platforms to run in parallel. This gradually validated the new architecture with production data. The teams could also observe in real-time the gains in performance, traceability, and monitoring: a motivating engine for all!
Result:
• No incidents for our clients in production.
• Successful launch of a new major client three weeks after going live: Nirio, a subsidiary of the FDJ Group, for its “Premio” offer.
• Launch of a highly anticipated new feature, directly implemented at Nirio: multi-account management.
Since April 29, thanks to our cutting-edge technology, FDJ offers a new comprehensive payment solution for individuals. The offer includes payment account management and multi-account functionality, issuance of physical and virtual cards, management of transfers and direct debits, as well as cash deposits. Available on the mobile app, this offer also leverages FDJ’s network of bar-tobacco shops for a local service.
For more details on this client case, check out our dedicated article!
Embedded Payment Pushing Boundaries
With this technical capability, Xpollens announces its ability to support even more companies looking to grow or transform without changing their bank. The strength of the BaaS model lies in its ability to integrate directly into companies’ tools. No change of provider or tool is required: API-integrable functionalities add a layer to the existing infrastructure.
Today, integrating payments is increasingly popular, and we see use cases multiplying: comptatech players or ISVs (independent software vendors) wanting to enrich their offerings, platforms and marketplaces wanting to disburse funds to their sellers with an agile system, retailers wanting to enrich their loyalty programs or simply offer alternative payment methods to cards… more and more companies see opportunities to increase their revenue and optimize customer satisfaction with instant and automatable payments.
But we also see emerging needs for Corporate Finance and Treasury departments, looking to save time on tedious invoice processing, payment, and collection processes that are still too often manual and with non-compressible deadlines. Integrating virtual IBANs to track each invoice, instant and configurable payment solutions for mass payments… are attracting large and medium-sized enterprises.
Want to know more about the potential of BaaS for Corporate Treasurers? Check out our White Paper written in partnership with Capgemini.
Special Bonus: A Core Banking System Overhaul Calls for a Celebration. ?
*Agile organization in a multi-squad context working around the same complex product.
