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PagerDuty Paying Dividends for Form3’s Digital Payment Platform

by Isabella Dossola July 16, 2020 | 3 min read

Your payment systems have slowed to a crawl, customers are getting impatient and abandoning their shopping carts both online and in stores, and you’re losing money every minute this problem goes on. Behind the scenes, technical responders are scrambling to resolve the issue before it impacts more customers—and before even more money is lost.

This experience is exactly what Form3—a UK-based, cloud-native, payment-as-a-service platform—aims to eliminate. The company provides payment technology, processing, and infrastructure to the financial services industry, enabling organizations to clear transactions faster. Due to its cloud-native platform running on AWS, Form3 is able to deliver faster payment processing to their customers than they are accustomed to, as typical payment platforms that are not cloud-first are often held back by monolithic processes and legacy infrastructure.

At PagerDuty’s Summit EMEA 2020, Eimear O’Connor, Chief Operations Officer of Form3, shared how her company uses the PagerDuty platform in combination with AWS cloud infrastructure to improve their operations to ensure the best possible customer experience—so that their clients’ end customers can pay seamlessly when checking out with their shopping carts and merchants can capture as much revenue as possible. Several banks, e-commerce platforms, credit card providers, fintech companies, and financial institutions all rely on Form3 to ensure payment transactions are secure, reliable, and processed quickly.

The Need for Speed

O’Connor’s team is responsible for maintaining the successful operation of Form3’s platform and ensuring a positive and consistent customer experience. During her PagerDuty Summit EMEA session, she described how their customers expect instantaneous access to view the status of their payments, which they need to ensure their services are up and running around the clock. And when incidents inevitably occur, Form3 needs the ability to orchestrate a swift response and ensure the right responders are contacted at the right time to resolve issues to reduce the impact on customers.

To achieve all this, O’Connor and her team knew they needed a solution that could quickly identify and notify teams what was happening if any services started to experience a disruption or outage. Form3 adopted a DevOps approach from its inception, building a culture of accountability and ownership with its teams and leveraging PagerDuty to empower engineers to build their own schedules, customize alerts, and gain real-time visibility into incidents. “We utilize PagerDuty to coordinate all of our intelligence, 24/7, 365 alert and incident response. We use predefined on-call scheduling and escalations based on alert types, which are then instantly directed to the right DevOps teams that can then respond in real-time,” O’Connor said.

Because Form3 is growing so quickly, O’Connor also shared that implementing automation capabilities into their infrastructure and provisioning processes will help their teams scale more easily on AWS. For example, to help speed up the onboarding process for engineers, the company is utilizing PagerDuty’s Terraform integration to automatically provision the PagerDuty instance.

Additionally, PagerDuty isn’t just used by engineering teams and on-call responders. By using the PagerDuty API, Form3 was able to develop an integration that helps track and report on-call hours for responders. With this integration, the company’s finance team can now easily view a report detailing any on-call hours worked and pay employees accordingly.

Interested in hearing the full story? To view Form3’s session and others at Summit EMEA, register here—it’s free!