Judopay builds efficient, dependable, agile payment solutions on a reactive architecture

The companies that kick-started the digital payments revolution began building their technology stacks more than a decade ago—before the current cloud-native, mobile-first paradigm. New market entrants therefore have a competitive opportunity to create solutions that are truly in tune with today’s fast-changing payments landscape.

Like all start-ups, Judopay needed to get to market fast and prove the viability of its value proposition. The company built a fast, reliable and scalable payments platform in the cloud, and quickly began to win retail customers attracted to its mobile-centric and in-app solutions. But as Judopay continued to grow, it became clear that the existing platform would not support its future ambitions.

Rob Howes, CTO at Judopay, explains: “Built into Judopay’s DNA is the idea of scaling with our customers to be wherever in the world they want to operate, and to support whatever forms of payment they want to accept. When I joined the company, I wanted to ensure that the technology stack would continue to align with that philosophy. This meant improving our ability to pivot, react and scale in response to changing customer needs.”

The existing monolithic technology stack had performed and scaled well, but no longer offered sufficient flexibility and efficiency to support Judopay’s goals. As a growing business with huge potential in the UK—its home market—and internationally, the key challenge for Judopay was to avoid becoming a victim of its own success.

“No matter how far or fast the business expands, our customers need a dependable service with consistently low latency,” says Rob Howes. “And internally, we need the ability to scale in flexible increments without a proportional increase in costs. Shifting to a microservices-based architecture based on reactive principles meant that we could scale individual elements in a more agile and efficient way.”