First Class Service: Helping Travix Broaden Its Payment Possibilities
Payment processing. It isn’t sexy. But travel? Now you’re talking! Anything that makes flight and hotel booking simple, effective, and easy brings travellers that one step close to their getaway. And that’s exactly what the Levi9 team helped Travix do.
Travix is an online travel company operating worldwide selling flight tickets and various other travel-related products. At the heart of their business is payments processing, which is used as part of a larger infrastructure, to enable flight reservations, customer tickets, and payment settlements.
Effective payments processing is also crucial for detecting fraudsters. Our journey together started back in June 2017 and finished in December 2020.
From Monolith To Microservices
When we began working together, Travix was developing a suite of microservices to serve payments processing and fraud checking. As a small company, their payments services had been contained within a single solution – the monolith. But as the company expanded, the process had become heavyweight, error prone, and extremely complex.
To this end, Travix had extracted a suite of microservices from their monolith to make the deployment process more powerful and less difficult. This shift meant that the rollouts were faster and less error prone. However at that time, their payment platform was restricted to a single provider, Ogone, which offered customers a limited range of ways to pay.
Global Customers And Local Markets
When it comes to processing payments, different nations trust and prefer different payment options – different Payment Services Providers (PSPs) – such as Visa, iDeal, and PayPal.
Due to Travix’s global expansion plan, they needed to increase the number of payment methods in order to provide lower cost, geo-located, popular payment options that could increase trust and optimize currency conversion rates in local markets.
Another business goal set by Travix was to further B2B integration. Although Travix only sold through its website, the aim was to become a payment service provider itself and offer services as a third-party through other sites.
By increasing the number of payment providers on offer, Levi9 was able to help Travix extend their reach in countries like China and Turkey. To achieve this goal, Levi9 and Travix teams joined forces to integrate two more Payment Service Providers: ACI and WorldPay. In some instances, this led to an increase in payments of up to 60%.
How Our Collaboration Worked
Levi9’s involvement began as a distributed team. We had four developers working alongside a team of four from Travix. There was a high workload, but we worked closely together and helped to bridge knowledge gaps. To do this, we organised Scrum training in Romania to help identify pain points. The whole team came over and we used the time to share our own knowledge and skills to help work out issues.
In a way, it was scheduled as awareness training, but we also used it as a chance to take action. We didn’t only help from a technical perspective; the session helped increase the team’s rapport and productivity; enabling all to work more effectively together.
Having the team meet face to face helped us to realize that we could work incrementally; we could be more organised and we could have a better way of driving things forward. It gave both sides greater discipline and focus; plus there was a better camaraderie between team members.
After migration, we faced some challenges – there was a lot of business logic – but Travix had already fitted the Payments Service Providers into the existing infrastructure, monitoring all of the features delivered and solving issues such as all of the processes behind the payment.
In our last year of collaboration, we also helped build a new platform for both B2C and B2B users.
What We Learned From Our Collaboration
- Experience has taught us the value of meeting people face to face and establish a team spirit.
- By being open and honest with each other you can overcome challenges. Technical skills can be acquired, but soft skills really help to build a strong collaboration.
- Giving constructive feedback – to say when things aren’t working – and to show gratitude when they are, means that problems can always be overcome.
- And of course these values also apply and cary through in current work-from-home times!
Travix & Trip.com
Travix’s payment platform now provides a wide variety of payment methods like credit cards (such as Visa, MasterCard and Amex) and alternative payment methods (like PayPal, iDeal and Trustly) through the external PSPs – Ogone, ACI, and WorldPay. It also uses a mobile wallet. Apple Pay was integrated when it launched in the Netherlands and Apple even showcased Travix on the Apple Pay site.
In recent years, Travix has embraced B2B integration – allowing other companies to use their services and process the payments through Travix’s system. And since being acquired by Trip.com, Travix has had plenty of opportunities to grow and expand in the market to more locations with a high volume, low margin approach.
