…seek resilient systems against false debits, network disruptions

By Juliet Umeh

Worried by payment failures, false debits, network disruptions and other technical glitches confronting users of digital financial services, Moniepoint has brought together senior engineers across Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem to develop practical approaches to building more reliable payment systems and protecting customers when transactions fail.

The fintech company convened engineers from Flutterwave, Cowrywise, Nomba and other players at its inaugural Off-the-Record Engineering Mixer in Lagos, where participants examined how financial technology platforms can better handle system failures, network dependencies, security risks and the complexities associated with processing transactions at scale.

The discussions focused on “Building for Scale: The Trade-offs of Distributed Systems in Fintech” and “Building Distributed Systems for POS at Scale.”

At the heart of the discussions was the challenge of ensuring that customers do not suffer financial losses or prolonged uncertainty when payment systems encounter problems.

Moniepoint said bringing senior engineering practitioners together reflected its belief that many of the technical challenges confronting Africa’s fintech industry are shared problems that require greater exchange of knowledge and practical experience among those building and managing payment infrastructure.

The company also highlighted measures it has adopted to strengthen the resilience of its card payment infrastructure and reduce incidents where customers are debited for transactions whose outcomes remain uncertain.

Speaking at the event, Engineering Manager, Card Payments at Moniepoint, Ayomide Kolawole, said payment platforms must be deliberately designed to anticipate failure and protect customers when problems occur.

“Building reliable payment infrastructure is about understanding every point at which a transaction can fail, determining what the system knows at each stage and designing the right response when things go wrong.

“Our responsibility is to ensure that customers are not left carrying the consequences of uncertainty created within a system they rely on,” Kolawole said.

He explained that building reliable financial infrastructure should go beyond transaction speed to ensuring that customers are adequately protected whenever the underlying technology fails.

“For us, the goal is not simply to process transactions quickly, but to make sure that when something goes wrong, the customer experience does not become the cost of that failure,” he added.

According to Moniepoint, its card payment infrastructure currently processes more than 20 million transactions daily and has been designed around an approach that anticipates possible failures.

The company explained that when its system has sufficient information to determine that a transaction is unlikely to succeed, it terminates the transaction quickly rather than leaving the customer waiting unnecessarily.

Where the outcome of a transaction remains uncertain, however, the system continues to establish what actually happened before giving the customer a definitive response.

Another component of the infrastructure continuously evaluates the performance of individual issuing banks across different processors, monitoring transaction success rates and response times in real time.

Moniepoint said when the performance of a particular destination falls below a configured threshold, the system automatically stops routing transactions through it, helping to reduce prolonged transaction delays and prevent failed transactions from accumulating within the payment infrastructure.

Participants at the mixer also examined the trade-offs involved in technical approaches such as sharding, asynchronous processing and service decomposition.

They noted that while such technologies could solve particular problems associated with processing large transaction volumes, they could also create fresh operational and maintenance challenges if not properly managed.

The engineers further identified observability and security as critical to detecting problems early, understanding system behaviour and preventing technical failures from escalating into disruptions that affect customers.

According to Moniepoint, the initiative is expected to encourage greater technical knowledge-sharing among fintech engineers and contribute to building more resilient financial infrastructure across the ecosystem.

The company said the central lesson from the discussions was that reliability should not be measured only by how well payment systems work under normal circumstances, but also by how effectively they respond when things go wrong.

It added that the Off-the-Record Engineering Mixer was created as an open forum for practitioners to examine the failures, trade-offs and engineering decisions behind the systems powering financial services across Africa.