Limepay: Providing a seamless digital payment flow for a better customer experience

From full payments to instalment payment options, merchants require a variety of payment methods to attract online shoppers and boost sales. Limepay, a payment solutions platform, enables merchants to embed digital payment services on their sites with a simple plugin. This allows merchants to retain customers on their website for a smooth checkout instead of directing them to another website.

Limepay, powered by Google Cloud, allows merchants to focus on marketing their products, such as creating awareness and building customer loyalty, by enabling them to keep their customers in their ecosystem. Working on the back end, Limepay helps merchants own customer relationships by sending payment-related emails with their branding. This means that customers will not need to be redirected to a third-party site for payments, creating a more seamless shopping experience.

Every day, Limepay processes millions of dollars of transactions, ranging from retail purchases to real estate loans. As a fintech company, it places a huge emphasis on resilience, knowing that an outage can affect a merchant's bottom line and customers' trust. Limepay migrated from its legacy cloud platform to Google Cloud in 2021 to improve its resilience and scalability as its business grew.

"Google Cloud gives us the ability to innovate and scale globally," says Andy Britz, Chief Technology Officer at Limepay. "Fully managed products such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and BigQuery simplify operations, so we don't worry about the cloud infrastructure. From a resilience perspective, I can sleep well at night and not panic about downtime."

Increasing developer productivity to unlock innovation

Limepay was created as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 2018 on its legacy cloud platform to attract early adopter customers. As the company grew over time, Limepay needed to deliver more customer features and meet evolving market needs. During its evaluation of cloud service providers, Limepay found that Google Cloud offers the best combination of Kubernetes and data tooling in the market to speed up development and improve data insights. This prompted the company to deploy GKE to manage its technology stack.

"Kubernetes is an ideal application platform for our multi-tenant application to serve different customers. Our entire technology stack on Google Kubernetes Engine is reusable and customizable to match the merchant's brand," says Britz. "The great thing about GKE is that we can run multiple instances of our app, even at the data layers, so it's always available when customers want to checkout." Britz adds that as developers of Kubernetes, the GKE container infrastructure is more mature than any other cloud provider.

Limepay worked with Google Cloud engineers to migrate and rebuild its platform on Google Cloud within 18 months. Kubernetes offers binary compatibility across legacy systems and the new ones, creating a single deployment unit Limepay can easily manage. For automation, Limepay uses Terraform with Google Cloud so their developers can deploy resources in a standard environment with confidence.

Currently, Limepay offers two solutions to its customers: an out-of-box offering for mid-market customers called STACK, or bespoke payment solutions for vertical partners, such as the MarketNow payment solution for Domain, a digital property portal. With GKE, Limepay builds, tests, and continuously deploys new features that merchants can access on its standard payment gateway. Developers can quickly create new clusters for bespoke projects in independent environments to speed up development without interfering with the shared infrastructure.

Enhancing security at checkout with Google Cloud

For obvious reasons, payment security is high on the priority list for customers and merchants. Limepay takes advantage of Google Cloud's security standards, which comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) to protect cardholder data. Furthermore, Limepay uses Cloud Identity to create an audit trail of who signs in to the platform and when, so that every action taken on the platform is traceable.

Limepay uses the Security Command Center to improve the security of its cloud environment. Using this cloud service, admins are able to see in real-time what resources are deployed for each project and take action on any misconfigurations that may put them at risk of cyber-attacks.

Britz adds the security best practices of Google Cloud helps the team meet the highest level of compliance, allowing them to securely process payments for hundreds of businesses.

Faster checkout process for improving brand loyalty

Limepay understands the value for merchants of keeping customers on their branded payment ecosystem in order to build loyalty. Customers are more likely to complete their eCommerce purchases if their checkout page is consistent with the rest of the website. For up to the minute reporting, Limepay relies on BigQuery as its data warehouse, in conjunction with Looker for fast dashboard and report iteration.

To accept payment in instalments — such as BNPL loans — and administer payment plans, Limepay owns a loan book and takes the credit risks on behalf of the merchants. Using BigQuery, the company runs credit analysis on consumers who sign up for its BNPL product on any merchant website and shares the lending decision in real time so they can complete their purchase.

"We prefer the simplicity of SQL to query data for business insights," says Britz. "BigQuery gives us a basic SQL interface that meets our current needs with the ability to scale complex queries for massive datasets as our transactions increase."

As Limepay processes more transactions, it gains a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour. The company wants to share those insights that merchants can't derive from their own data sets, such as average cost of sales and basket size versus their peers. Using these value-added services, merchants can fine-tune their marketing strategies, targeting the right market with targeted payment solutions.

Understanding data insights with real-time visualisation on Looker

Limepay's business relies heavily on its data system driven by BigQuery and Looker for everything from sales reporting, merchant analysis, and financial reporting. Since migrating to Google Cloud, Limepay visualises usage and performance information on the Looker dashboard to see how consumers interact with Limepay services on merchant websites.

"Looker plays phenomenally well with BigQuery and requires minimal effort for users with authorised access to move data between Google Cloud products," says Britz. "By ingesting our application logs into BigQuery and building dashboards in Looker, we can see which services are utilised, how, when, and why. This insight into user interactions is massively useful so we can optimise the platform for better sales."

As well as the engineering team, the marketing team uses Looker to create go-to-market strategies and marketing campaigns. By cross-referencing lifetime revenue, lifetime merchant sales, and other data points on the dashboard, the marketing team was able to refine the target market segment for its business.

Scaling machine learning workflows for insights

Limepay runs an extensive risk program for its loan portfolio, which includes analytics of loan default rates, uptake rates, and the creditworthiness of customers.

"Google Cloud has provided us with a solid foundation with well-integrated products and services that can be leveraged as we expand our platform," says Britz. "AutoML offers pre-trained models, so we can harness the power of AI to enrich data. Now, we're exploring AutoML on BigQuery to uncover hidden patterns, learn more about our consumers, and improve lifetime value for our merchants."