Enabling secure payments for Irish education agency

Our client is an Ireland-based integrated state agency responsible for education quality assurance, standards, awards, and training programs' validation. Thousands of students, learners, and educators use its services to achieve their educational goals. In 2018 alone, the company assigned approximately 225,000 awards to learners and 160,000 certificates to students who completed various educational and training programs.

With thousands of students, learners, and educators using the agency’s services to achieve their educational goals, our client needed to develop a solution which would allow its customers to pay for the verification of their education awards and certificates, certificate replacement, etc. The solution had to:

• Provide an efficient, accurate, and quick money transfer process with a modern end-to-end solution  
• Ensure top levels of stability and performance of the system  
• Implement highest possible privacy and reliability of the platform in coherence with the latest EU-wide regulations

We developed a user-friendly solution based on the Microsoft cloud technologies to ensure unparalleled levels of scalability, performance, and security, which would allow the agency’s customers to pay for their education services. As part of the project, we:

• Developed an efficient solution based on the Microsoft Azure platform 
• Automated common manual tasks for business users and the agency’s customers 
• Built a complex serverless architecture for quick automated payments processing 
• Integrated the Secure Hosted Payment Page (HPP) gateway plugin by Global Payments, an international provider of online payment solutions, for additional privacy of end-users and a customized look and feel of payment form in accordance with the agency’s branding 
• Implemented the best security practices, such as the 3-D Secure protocol and PSD2 
• Ensured full security compliance with European standards and regulations, including ISO and GDPR 
• Integrated with an internal processing system to handle requests in accordance with the Agency’s business processes

Technologies & tools

• Azure and related services 
• Microservices 
• .NET Core 
• Angular 
• ASP.NET Core 
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 
• Realex Payments API Server 
• Azure Web App 
• Azure Web Jobs 
• Azure Service Bus 
• AppInsight 
• Azure Blob 
• Azure Table 
• DevOps 

The solution fully addresses the needs of thousands of customers who can easily pay for education services with instant and accurate online payments available on the go. The solution presents multifold benefits:  

• Improved operational efficiency with accelerated workflow for business-users  
• Full customization suited to the business model of the client  
• Optimization and availability for all operational systems and handheld devices  
• A quick deployment process without downtimes  
• A secure and transparent service for end-users  
• Reduced maintenance load and costs