Paypal
Can real-time business insights be made better?
PayPal Holdings Inc. may be nearly one and half centuries younger than the likes of American Express, but its impact on the growth of the internet is undeniable. For millions of people around the world, PayPal is what helped them grow comfortable with eCommerce, particularly due to its tight integration with eBay.
With its core infrastructure powering billions of internet transactions everyday, PayPal’s global management team felt that waiting for historical reports (no matter how recent) to land in their inboxes was not good enough, especially if you’re one of the biggest players in the global payments space. With internal teams asking for months to complete this project, the company knocked on our doors and asked us to develop a bespoke business intelligence dashboard in a few weeks. The extremely tight deadline was a byproduct of the dashboard’s criticality, as it was to be used to keep track of PayPal’s key business metrics in real-time.
A product that meets the highest security standards
Our engineering team collaborated with teams from PayPal’s global network of offices in different time zones to decide on, and execute the dashboard’s development blueprint. We also went on to build a secure data transformation layer into the solution so that the dashboard could do its job without creaking under the weight of the data coming through it. To make sure that data could be visualised in just the right way, we used the D3.js framework, which is the most robust library available to visualise data in a web browser.
Given the sensitive nature of the information that would flow through the dashboard, it was important for our team to work within the boundaries set by PayPal’s cybersecurity team. The data transformation layer was wrapped with a proprietary framework provided by PayPal for added security, and we were only allowed to use devices that were configured and shipped to us by PayPal. We even had to make sure that every bit of code was written from scratch to eliminate the risk of vulnerabilities being brought on by the use of third-party code.
When one good thing leads to another
Impressed by our engineering prowess, PayPal also asked us to build a Customer Experience portal through which the company’s Enterprise Sales teams could showcase business solutions implemented using Paypal infrastructure to select high-value merchants. Here again, our team pulled through by completing the project well within the expected delivery timeline, while taking pains to develop custom modules from the ground up that were safe, beautiful, and most importantly, effective.
Collaborating with a company like PayPal that possesses a sprawling and complex maze of technology is no walk in the park, but coordinating with teams around the world adds an extra layer of difficulty, especially when timelines are tight. But the fact that we still delivered these projects on time while meeting all expectations is testament to the rigor and discipline of the project management processes we follow here at Calcey.
