WEX Increases EnCompass Efficiency and Reliability by Modernizing the Virtual Card Portal with Kunai
Background
WEX Inc. is one of the largest commercial card issuers and payment processors in the world. They process over $120 billion annual payments across four main divisions: Corporate payments, Travel, Healthcare, and Fleet.
Founded in 1895 as a family business, WEX has since grown to be a global giant, employing more than 2,700 employees across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
The Challenge
The 2010’s saw WEX show astronomical growth across all sectors. However, they soon reached a point where further expansion was being bottlenecked by physical hardware stacks and outdated tech infrastructure.
In 2014, WEX began the process of migrating their physical data warehousing to AWS cloud services. This process would later resolve their scalability bottlenecks.
However, WEX needed to go in and update all of their applications and features to more robust, modern software best practices.
In particular, WEX wanted to update and future-proof their EnCompass platform to ensure smooth, secure operation of virtual payments, expense management, and payment solutions across their four major divisions.
Virtual Payments
As convenient as they may be, virtual payments may be prone to slow processing times, security issues, availability and reliability concerns, difficulty navigating the platform, and compatibility issues across devices and platforms.
Without regular maintenance, these systems may eventually fall behind modern best practices. This oversight creates a frustrating and antagonistic experience for customers, decreasing revenue, customer satisfaction, and market share.
Expense Management
Expense management tools offer customers a transparent view of their virtual cards and accounts. WEX offers their customers a range of tools and services to help them manage and track their expenses through portals, mobile apps, and reporting tools.
Hangups, errors, and crashes create a sense of uncertainty and hesitation in the end-user, which could potentially cause WEX to seem like a liability and risk to the customer.
Payment Solutions
Given that WEX provides payment solutions in both B2C and B2B enterprise capacities, reliability and security are a must.
And much like virtual payments, these systems may eventually become prone to slow processing times, security issues, unavailability, and reliability concerns.
Finding the Right Devs
To update WEX EnCompass to modern software best practice standards, the right development team would require deep experience in fintech development, friendly UX/UI design, cybersecurity practices to protect against cyber threats, and robust Fullstack experience to quickly identify, repair, and update EnCompass’ backend and frontend weaknesses.
Additionally, the development team would need to be highly communicative and adaptable. Given EnCompass’ importance in WEX’s ecosystem, the team would have to exchange feedback with WEX’s Product leadership in real-time as the scope of EnCompass’ revision evolved.
Lastly, the team would have to be able to develop around short timetables without compromising quality.
The Solution
WEX’s goal is to help customers make payments more efficiently and to give them greater visibility and control over their spending.
But as WEX continued to grow, they found themselves having to both scale up the number of payments they could process while reducing the amount of time it took to process those payments.
WEX Inc. approached Kunai to devise a plan to upgrade their existing virtual card portal to a modern structure. This restructuring would include both front-end design and navigation updates as well as back-end security and efficiency upgrades.
Kunai’s wealth of experience in Fintech integrations, comprehensive expertise of Fullstack development, and nimble product development team had prepared them to meet the tight deadlines for each and every deliverable.
The Result
EnCompass– A Vision Reenvisioned
Kunai quickly put together a Fullstack engineering team to tackle this major project. They worked together with WEX’s Product leadership and design team to identify areas of improvement and exchange feedback on product direction based on all parties’ wealth of experience– with Kunai’s suggested changes to the EnCompass Virtual Card portal leading to increased test user satisfaction.
Kunai’s approach to upgrading EnCompass’ systems centered around structuring EnCompass to fully support the rest of the applications in the full WEX ecosystem.
The Back-End
Kunai’s development team started by addressing the most pressing issues: identifying security weaknesses and modernizing .NET code on the back-end.
EnCompass was by no means a derelict system, but its back-end weaknesses were a side effect of the rapidly evolving technologies in software development.
After upgrading EnCompass’ back-end, Kunai built architectural diagrams for the authentication and authorization functionalities, providing a clear visualization for any future development teams that might work on the aforementioned security systems. This would ensure the long-term security of user data.
These changes positioned WEX as a thought leader in the industry, showcasing extreme reliability and security.
The Front-End
One of the areas of the EnCompass platform that needed improvement was the front-end design.
Kunai worked closely with the WEX design team to bring their designs to life. These new designs combined with Kunai’s UX experience ensured that users would have a seamless navigation experience. Users would intuitively know exactly what to find and where to find it.
Additionally, architectural diagrams for the authentication and authorization were utilized to provide users a fully transparent view of their virtual cards and accounts.
These changes created a more friendly and convenient experience for the end-user.
Full Ecosystem Support
Having restructured EnCompass to mesh seamlessly with other applications in WEX’s ecosystem, Kunai continued along those lines to conduct information and knowledge transfer seminars.
These seminars shared Kunai’s expertise, methodology, and ideas with other areas of WEX. This way, other sectors across WEX’s internal teams can upskill their developers and designers to adhere to cutting edge software best practice.
Future Collaboration
Thanks to Kunai’s ability to deliver stellar results while keeping to tight deadlines, WEX contracted Kunai to tackle future projects within their company.
This is just the beginning for WEX and EnCompass, as future collaboration with Kunai is sure to further improve efficiency, drive customer satisfaction, and optimize on operational expenses.