Stabilizing and Scaling Multi-Platform Payment Systems Toward 99.99% Availability

Customer Snapshot

Industry: Payments & FinTech

Region: South Africa & Kenya

Platforms: PayFast, PayGate, SID, DPO (Kenya)

Engagement Model:

• Scrums.com Plan: Enterprise
• DevOps & Software Engineering Health Check
• Architecture Review
• SEOP (Software Engineering Orchestration Platform)

The Challenge

As transaction volumes increased and geographic expansion accelerated, the payments group was operating multiple legacy and modern platforms simultaneously - each with different risk profiles, tooling, and operational maturity.

Key challenges included:

Platform availability & reliability

• Recurring production incidents with unclear root causes
• Self-inflicted incidents driven by change and deployment risk
• Inconsistent redundancy and failover models
• Disaster recovery and logging gaps reducing recovery confidence

Delivery & change risk

• Slow deployment cycles and conservative release windows
• High change failure rates and limited rollback paths
• Environment drift across dev, QA, pre-prod, and production
• Manual QA processes increasing defect leakage

Incident response & recovery

• Extended Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
• Fragmented observability and logging across platforms
• Poor correlation between incidents, deployments, and code changes
• Limited systemic learning from incident retrospectives

Cost & productivity pressure

• Rising run and infrastructure costs with no clear optimization levers
• Engineering capacity absorbed by operational overhead
• Leadership lacked a single, prioritized view tying reliability, speed, and cost together

The Goal

• Establish a single source of truth across four critical platforms
• Identify real root causes behind incidents and instability
• Reduce change failure and deployment risk
• Improve observability, MTTR, and recovery confidence
• Define a practical path toward 99.99% availability
• Do all of the above without risky platform rewrites

Scrums.com Solution

Scrums.com delivered an independent, production-grounded Engineering & DevOps Health Check, acting as an objective assessment layer across architecture, tooling, and delivery workflows.

Key components included:

Platform-by-platform assessment

• Architecture and scalability review, including redundancy and failure modes
• Infrastructure and hosting analysis across environments
• CI/CD pipeline evaluation covering change failure and rollback
• QA and testing maturity assessment (unit, automation, integration, E2E)
• Observability, logging, and incident response review
• All access was strictly read-only to ensure safety and independence

Root cause–led incident analysis

• Reviewed 12–24 months of incident history
• Classified self-inflicted vs external failures
• Mapped incidents to architecture, tooling, and process weaknesses
• Identified systemic patterns rather than isolated symptoms

On-site engineering deep-dives

• Cape Town: PayFast and PayGate engineering, QA, and DevOps teams
• Johannesburg: leadership, architecture, and infrastructure reviews
• Kenya (DPO): full on-site platform and operations assessment
• Combined interviews, workflow observation, and architecture validation

SEOP™-driven maturity benchmarking

• DORA and SPACE indicators
• Delivery flow from idea to production
• Tooling overlap and automation gaps
• Alignment between product, engineering, QA, and operations

Results

• A single, consolidated view across four complex payment platforms
• Clear visibility into root causes, not just symptoms
• Platform-by-platform maturity benchmarks
• A prioritized improvement roadmap covering: Availability and resilience, Change safety and deployment speed, Defect leakage and QA effectiveness, Incident recovery and observability, Engineering productivity and run-cost efficiency; A practical, phased pathway toward 99.99% uptime, and Increased leadership confidence through clarity, structure, and trade-offs

Why This Matters

For high-scale payments platforms, availability is a business-critical capability - not just a technical metric.

This engagement enabled the client to:

• Understand why incidents were happening
• Balance reliability, speed, and cost in one roadmap
• Reduce operational risk without destabilising live systems
• Make confident, informed decisions about the next phase of growth

High availability isn’t achieved through tools alone

Scrums.com helps FinTech and payments platforms stabilize, scale, and modernize through architecture, process, and disciplined execution.

👉 Book an Engineering Health Check to understand your real risks and opportunities