VARTEQ

FINTECH CASE STUDY

NORTH merchant & partner platform case study

Modernizing a serverless merchant and partner platform on AWS while continuing to ship business-critical features.

TRANSFORM WITH VARIOUS TECHNOLOGIES

At a glance

Client
NORTH
Industry
FinTech
Services
Application Modernization, Custom Software Development, API Integration
Partner notification time
Hours → seconds
Repositories migrated to GitHub Actions
10+
Microservices upgraded to Node.js 22
14+
Onboarding warning test scenarios passed
16/16

OVERVIEW

Project overview

NORTH is a cloud-based merchant and partner platform built on serverless microservices on AWS. It covers merchant onboarding, partner integrations, authentication and authorization, business workflows and notifications.

VARTEQ's team works across platform engineering and business-critical product development, from deployment pipelines, runtime upgrades and security to authorization, partner notifications and onboarding features.

WHERE THEY STARTED

The challenge

The goal was to modernize the platform while continuing to ship business-critical changes.

Deployment and runtime

A fragmented CI/CD setup across 10+ repositories, outdated Node.js versions and critical dependency vulnerabilities, all to be fixed without breaking existing plugins or deployments.

Access and partner reliability

Complex authentication and authorization for internal services and external clients, and partner integrations that had to work in real time, even when a partner's system was slow or down.

Business rules

Legacy services with dense business and payment logic, where one validation module alone runs to 5,000+ lines, plus broken API documentation and test data.

WHAT WE BUILT

The solution

  1. CI/CD and runtime modernization

    10+ serverless repositories moved from Bitbucket to GitHub Actions, with a standardized build-once, deploy-everywhere process, so the tested artifact is the deployed one.

    • Upgraded 14+ microservices to Node.js 22
    • Remediated critical dependency vulnerabilities
    • Added CI pre-flight checks to catch missing build tools early
    • Wrote migration documentation for other teams
    • Recovered about 650 broken mock and test values across 103 files, with production data kept isolated

  2. Authentication and authorization

    A scalable authorization model for internal services and external clients.

    • Database-backed role-based access control (RBAC) for roles, permissions and resource-level access
    • Standardized token-based authentication
    • Client ID and client secret authentication
    • Reusable authentication libraries
    • Permission checks designed to stay fast as the platform grows

  3. Partner notifications

    An event-driven platform that automatically delivers critical business events to external partners.

    • Sensitive-data cleansing
    • Security validation of external destinations
    • Digital message signatures
    • Delivery audit trails, failure monitoring and team alerts

    Partners are processed independently, so one unavailable endpoint does not hold up delivery to the others.

  4. Merchant onboarding rules

    Complex business rules in the merchant onboarding platform, such as the 'No Deployment' option, which sales agents didn't always read as 'no equipment will ship'.

    • Investigated every relevant case
    • Aligned the expected behavior with the business
    • Added a confirmation-stage warning covering all applicable scenarios
    • Business rules checked before QA to catch edge cases earlier

SERVICES ON THIS PROJECT

TECHNOLOGIES USED

  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon API Gateway
  • Amazon S3
  • AWS CodeBuild
  • AWS MWAA (Apache Airflow)
  • Serverless Framework
  • Node.js 22
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • React
  • Redux
  • Keycloak
  • Jest
  • Playwright
  • Snyk
  • GitHub Actions
  • OpenAPI

Development tools: Claude Code

WHAT CHANGED

The outcome

  • Partner notifications now arrive in seconds, instead of hours.
  • 100% of notification delivery attempts are recorded in the audit history.
  • 10+ repositories migrated to GitHub Actions with a standardized deployment process, and 14+ microservices upgraded to Node.js 22. Critical dependency vulnerabilities were remediated.
  • The onboarding warning passed all 16 test scenarios with no false warnings.
  • Reusable serverless patterns simplify building new services.

The project combined platform modernization with continued delivery of business-critical features.

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