mElements, a Polish provider of API banking and e-commerce solutions, introduced the country’s first payment gateway built purely on the public cloud. The solution, called Paynow, combines Microsoft Azure with Dynamics 365 to deliver a delightful digital shopping experience to e-commerce merchants and buyers. Built on highly scalable cloud infrastructure, Paynow offers top-level SLAs and uptimes in a rapidly growing market. The payment platform saw quick growing adoption in its first two years and currently serves more than 10,000 merchants around the country in various e-commerce business models.
mElements is a fin-tech subsidiary of mBank, one of Poland’s most innovative banks. In response to the growing e-commerce market, the company developed Paynow—the country’s first fully public cloud-based payment gateway.
Starting on the right foot
To go on the cloud, mElements needed a technology partner that didn’t just provide stability but could work within the necessary legal framework and adhere to the stringent financial regulations in Poland. “Getting licensed for a payment platform based on the public cloud is not an easy task,” explains Jaroslaw Stefański, CEO of mElements. “It requires a tremendous investment in legal and security competencies. We needed to build a solution that benefitted from cloud infrastructure while being trustworthy in the eyes of the regulatory bodies. This meant finding a partner that understood the challenge and was willing to work with us and the regulator. When we started, Microsoft was best positioned to support us in this process.”
And when it comes to security, Azure’s Security Model gives mElements the assurance it needs. “It’s important that we give merchants and buyers confidence,” adds Sebastian Sztajnert, CTO of mElements. “Azure has a lot of built-in measures to monitor and alert us when something doesn’t work properly.”
Rapid growth with low costs
By using Azure, mElements was able to quickly execute ideas while keeping costs low. “There are many points of view on cloud vs on-premises costs. For us, it was a no-brainer,” shares Stefański. “We started building the products but didn’t generate significant overhead costs until we had significant business growth. It reduced the financial risks of the project and allowed us to align cost and revenue generation, which optimized our runway. All of this is a standard for startups, but because of the regulated entity it was a big challenge.”
Opting for the cloud also meant Paynow could be easily scaled up or down to meet its merchants’ needs. The solution comes with Azure’s guaranteed high availability, with almost zero downtime and zero technical breaks. This scalability and availability helped mElements win some of the biggest merchants in the market. “24/7/365 availability in a payment gateway wasn’t the standard in the Polish market. But we can offer this as a core value proposition to our merchants – no matter if you sell one product a month or one product per second. The highest availability is at the core of our value proposition.” explains Stefański.
Pushing the envelope further
A moment of truth came when Paynow handled payments during the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity—one of the largest, nationwide charity events in Poland, where all Poles organize around a specific issue for one Sunday evening in January. “It amasses hundreds of millions of zloty of charitable deposits. This would’ve been impossible without this infrastructure,” Sztajnert says. “The event is an entire nation doing payments in one evening. We can handle more than 200 requests per second for our customers with extremely high SLAs, without weeks of preparation.”
“We can handle more than 200 requests per second for our customers, with extremely high SLAs, basically on demand, without days and weeks of preparation. That’s really important in such a dynamic market as e-comm.”
Sebastian Sztajnert, CTO, mElements
The evidence is telling; mElements’ customer base has grown four or five times each year since its launch, and currently services about 10,000 merchants in Poland. “On top of the core system quality, being cloud-native allowed us to build our development processes in a modern way. Operating in full CI/CD mode, Paynow is one the most advanced players in the market in terms of flexibility and speed of dedicated product parametrization, which is especially important for the larger merchants,” adds Stefański.
mElements’journey with Microsoft is just starting. The company has recently begun leveraging Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Service modules to boost its operations. “There’s untapped potential,” says Sztajnert. “We want to build a truly merchant-centric experience in a market that usually considers itself similar to electricity providers. With the use of Dynamics 365 modules, we aim to connect with customers and explore the possibilities offered by data with Azure.”
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