Seamlessly integrating a business intelligence platform and payment plugin for Mode

At a glance

Mode have over 200 years of real world operational experience, delivering successful financial services and technology-based businesses in the UK, Europe and the World. 

Mode have launched a range of innovative financial products, including a new-breed financial app for consumers, a payments and marketing platform for UK businesses to attract customers globally, and a revolutionary payments and loyalty solution for the UK market.

Time was of the essence with this project, as Mode had tight deadlines to hit to satisfy both the charity page development with accompanying payment gateways, as well as the launch of their new BI tool. Firemind were able to not only develop and make live both aspects, but were able to do so at a fast pace. Ensuring the Mode team could use their new tools with confidence, but also understand the scalability and user requirements of the new systems.

Challenge

Mode needed to improve their data insights and integrate a payment plugin into their Woocommerce platform.

Solution

Firemind implemented a Redash-based business intelligence platform on AWS Fargate, and integrated a Woocommerce payment plugin.

Services used
  • Amazon Fargate
  • Amazon RDS
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry
Outcomes
  •  12x faster data insight retrieval from the BI platform.
  • Expanded data insights across services.
Business challenges

Tackling complex data and payment integration needs

Mode had struggled with making the most of their heavy and intricate data sets across their financial solutions. They needed a ‘one-stop-shop’ that could cater to their heavy data demands by creating a Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. Ensuring that valuable data on specific products and currencies could be easily deciphered and provide meaningful insights into trends.

They also needed expert guidance and production of a payment plugin that could feed directly into their Woo Commerce plugin, as well as integrating these new pathways into their existing Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM).

Solution

Implementing a scalable BI solution and integrating payment workflows

We decided to work on the bulk of the project’s requirements first with the new BI solution. The Mode data team wanted to move away from using local Postgres clients to Redash, an open source solution that’s specifically useful for Github integration. This BI tool would allow their team to connect and query their data sources, build dashboards to visualise data and share insights them with their peers.

After the initial planning and preparation, we proposed a cloud architecture that would be built on top of AWS Managed Services such as Amazon Fargate, with containers stored in the Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

We determined the appropriate number of worker containers, and the sizing of said containers based off multiple discussions with the Mode Data team around potential utilisation. We also ensured a strong element of versatility and scalability in the solution, allowing for more crypto currency data, pricing adjustments and market economy overview.

In order to work correctly in the AWS environment, and to allow credentials to be passed securely via methods such as AWS Secrets Manager, Firemind created new Docker Images for each of the Redash Services as part of a CI pipeline – these images were based on the standard Redash images and had minor additions, such as the AWS CLI and start scripts that retrieve credentials at runtime.

It would be possible to deploy without modification of images, however, credentials would then need to be passed via ECS, which could be considered a security risk and should be avoided. These images were pushed to the Amazon Elastic Container Registry and were tested as part of the deployment process, initially using docker on local machines.

Once this BI was tested and running, we moved onto the charity pages that needed stable and secure payment gateways running alongside their chosen merchant, Woocommerce. We had recommended using the AWS Payments solution, but Mode were reluctant to change all current accounts to an unknown, and were happy with structuring and flexibility of Woocommerce.

Fast, scalable BI

The integration into Redash ensured Mode could have access to every data element within their business. Opening up new areas of data insight, across their wealth of financial and technology services, as well as a more broad analysis of their crypto currency trends and forecasts.

Fast to production

Within just 6 weeks, Firemind was able to hit the requirements of Mode, beating their deadline date whilst enabling a secure, well governed, cloud environment.

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