FreedomPay delivers seamless, secure online payment experiences with Dynatrace

FreedomPay is the world’s largest independent payment gateway and a leader in the Fintech space, with clients across some of the biggest names in retail, hospitality, transport, healthcare, entertainment, and finance. Thousands of customers rely on its Next Level Commerce™ platform to transact billions of dollars annually. With such an important responsibility transacting a very large number of financial transactions, it is critical that FreedomPay ensures its platform maintains high availability, lightning-fast performance and the utmost security.

As the business grew, FreedomPay adopted multiple monitoring solutions, hybrid infrastructure technologies and several third-party services to enable the scalability needed to keep up with the rising demand for its platform. Its disparate legacy monitoring tools weren’t fit for the complexity of this dynamic environment and forcing teams to operate in silos. The teams were spending a lot of time manually stitching transactional data together to find and resolve the root cause of issues; distracting them from working on innovations to improve the payments platform for their users. FreedomPay also faced increasing business risk as the sum amount of money moving throughout its platform and the number of users skyrocketed. To improve and advance its reputation as a trusted commercial payments partner, FreedomPay needed a more advanced, unified approach to observability, performance and security.

FreedomPay needed a holistic view of how transactions flowed through its systems and quickly identify any bottlenecks that might impact users. It needed the full context of any financial and security risks, as well as robust controls over who has access to transactional data. Dynatrace stood out due to its compliance with regulatory standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and its cutting-edge approach to unifying observability, performance and security information, which promised to create a shared source of truth for all FreedomPay’s teams. With Dynatrace, teams would be able to manage end-to-end transactions in granular detail, identifying and resolving any technology risks quickly and decisively.

“Dynatrace is fundamental to FreedomPay’s ability to manage its technology and business risks,” comments Mark Tomlinson, Director of Performance and Observability at FreedomPay. “You wouldn’t transport millions of dollars in cash without putting it in super secure trucks where you could monitor their every turn. Our previous monitoring tools just couldn’t give us a unified visibility over the journey of our customers’ money. That’s why we turned to intelligent observability and security from Dynatrace.”

• Business insights: Dynatrace’s Grail technology enables FreedomPay to take observability beyond logs and traces to include the additional context provided by business events data. By connecting the performance of its technical infrastructure with the wider business, FreedomPay can understand the monetary cost of issues, and identify the exact number of users impacted. This helps teams prioritize incident resolution and share the information with leadership so they can recognize the business outcomes of digital transformation efforts.
• Better collaboration: FreedomPay has reduced its monitoring toolset from six tools to just one, with Dynatrace now acting as a single source of truth for all teams. Dynatrace automatically identifies the root cause of issues, so the need for blame games has been eliminated. Instead, teams can focus on resolving issues faster together. This improved collaboration has resulted in an 80% reduction in meantime to resolution.
• Frictionless payments experiences: Dynatrace provides FreedomPay with actionable AI-driven answers about how to optimize services proactively. Incremental improvements have resulted in a 50% reduction in the time taken to complete transactions, enabling FreedomPay to optimize the core service it provides to customers.
• Faster, secure innovation: Dynatrace is making FreedomPay’s developers more efficient and effective, as they are able to monitor the performance of code throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This visibility enables developers to identify opportunities to optimize code, become more secure, and reduce the risk of issues when launching new features. Dynatrace also supports FreedomPay’s reputation as a point-to-point encryption leader by offering data privacy by design capabilities, which support audits, and provide full control over who has access to transaction information.

“There was a bit of anxiety that our platform was getting too complex and growing too fast for us to do deep forensics. Dynatrace has completely overturned our expectations of what can be done for extremely scalable and highly secure systems like ours. They’re giving us insights and visibility into all the data that lights up the journey of every transaction we process and how it impacts our business,” continued Tomlinson. “Dynatrace gives our engineers the data and the language to talk business risk with our executive leadership. Our CEO even points to Dynatrace as the solution that always gives us the truth.”