Payments
A payment gateway from scratch that became its own business
- Industry
- Payments
- Engagement
- Full-time at Ministry Brands, employee number seven
- When
- 2014–18
- Stack
- C#
- ASP.NET Web API
- .NET
- Vue.js
- CI/CD
The challenge
Ministry Brands needed to process its own card traffic, and every brand it acquired would bring more. A payment gateway carries compliance obligations, and each new brand risked widening them.
The approach
- Designed and built the gateway from scratch as a set of ASP.NET services, as employee number seven.
- Gave each brand its own tokenization, so every acquired brand stayed out of its parent's PCI scope.
- Built the staff tooling that onboarded clients onto the gateway, and the pipelines that ran tests and checks before any merge.
The result
The gateway processed the company's card traffic and grew into its own business, Payment Brands, which serves the brands that joined the group. By Austin's account, with no public source, it came to carry $15B+ a year across 90+ brands while the company grew from 14 to 800 developers.
See it measured
Read the method and its limitsRecalled, not measured
What the gateway grew into, by Austin's account
Built from scratch as employee #7. By Austin's account the company grew from 14 to 800 developers, the gateway came to carry $15B+ a year across 90+ brands, and it was later spun out as its own business.
Every figure here is Austin's recollection of his time at Ministry Brands; no public source confirms it. The developer bars are drawn to scale.
Verdict
The gateway outgrew the company that built it and became a business of its own.
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