Keeping vendors vending

The Challenge

After Assembly Payments, an Australian fintech, secured funding from a major bank, a new cloud-based payments solution was needed to integrate with the bank's internal network. This platform would consume data from well over 50,000 POS terminals and online merchant stores. The solution had to comply with the bank's stringent governance, security, and regulatory requirements, and be ready in less than 12 months. Assembly Payments had been unable to find the right talent internally before the deadline, so they engaged Kablamo.

The platform comprised two critical components:

• Client-facing Merchant Payment Platform - Enable customers to take payments more flexibly, provide greater visibility into transactions, and give instant access to cash flow
• POS Real-Time Monitoring Tool - Built to handle 50,000 POS device feeds, enabling proactive troubleshooting to predict and fix POS issues before they impact the client, and allowing proactive management of customer terminals

The cloud environment had to connect into the major bank's internal systems via a network managed by one of Australia's largest telcos, while managing multiple stakeholders and third-party integrations. Both platforms had to be PCI compliant. PCI compliance in particular added significant constraints: every component that touched cardholder data needed to sit inside a hardened network segment with encrypted storage, restricted access, and continuous audit logging. These requirements shaped every architectural decision from day one.

The Approach

Kablamo augmented Assembly's Agile squads, setting up an iterative and immersive framework. The team worked closely with Assembly Payments' customer support agents in mutual discovery. This meant they could respond rapidly to feedback from each iteration, designing products with the user's needs front-and-centre. Support agents brought real-world insight into the most common merchant pain points: slow settlement visibility, difficulty diagnosing why a terminal had gone offline, and a lack of self-service tools for everyday account changes.

AWS was chosen for ease of integration, connectivity and rapid scalability. The maturity of AWS' platform provided robust VPN interconnectivity and encryption services to meet compliance and governance requirements. The architecture was built for high scalability to handle real-time ingestion of 50,000 POS terminal feeds.

The Merchant Payment Platform gave merchants a single dashboard to view transactions across all their terminals and online channels, track settlement status, and export reconciliation data. It replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets and email-based reporting that merchants had relied on previously. The interface was designed to surface the information that mattered most: outstanding settlements, failed transactions, and terminal health, all visible within seconds of logging in.

The POS Real-Time Monitoring Tool ingested telemetry from every terminal in the network. Each device reported heartbeat signals, transaction throughput, and error codes into a streaming pipeline. Automated rules flagged anomalies such as a terminal that had not sent a heartbeat in a configurable window, or a sudden spike in declined transactions at a single location. When the system detected an issue, it raised an alert for the support team before the merchant noticed a problem. This shifted the support model from reactive (waiting for a merchant to call) to proactive (reaching out with a fix already in hand).

The network topology required careful coordination. Traffic from Assembly's AWS environment traversed a dedicated VPN link into the bank's data centre, with the telco managing the underlying connectivity. Kablamo worked with both parties to define firewall rules, IP address allocations, and failover paths, ensuring that a link interruption would not leave merchants unable to process payments.

The Results

Both platforms were delivered in nine months, three months ahead of the original 12-month deadline. The partner was confident enough in the delivery to bring the go-live date forward. In the past, adding endpoints would take days. Now, thanks to the new AWS cloud environment, adding them only takes minutes and with no downtime. The platforms adhere to all security, governance, and regulatory requirements.

The proactive monitoring approach proved its value quickly. Terminal outages that previously went undetected for hours were now surfaced within minutes, and in many cases the support team resolved the issue before the merchant was aware of it. Merchants also gained self-service access to transaction history and settlement tracking for the first time, reducing the volume of inbound support calls and giving them direct visibility into their cash flow.

Looking Forward

The client-facing portal enables merchants to take payments more flexibly, with greater visibility, and provides instant access to cash flow. The POS Real-Time Monitoring Tool enables Assembly Payments to predict and troubleshoot issues before they impact merchants.

The highly scalable architecture ensures the platform can grow with Assembly Payments as they onboard new merchants and expand their POS terminal network beyond the initial 50,000 devices. The same streaming pipeline that monitors terminal health can absorb new device types and data sources as Assembly's product line expands, without requiring a re-architecture of the ingestion layer.