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.
Build with Various Technologies
- Client
- NORTH
- Industry
- FinTech
- Services
- Application Modernization, Custom Software Development, API Integration
At a glance
- Repositories migrated to GitHub Actions
- 10+
- Microservices upgraded to Node.js 22
- 14+
- Partner notification delivery
- Sub-second
- Business test scenarios passed
- 16/16
Overview
The Summary.
NORTH is a cloud-based merchant and partner platform built on a scalable serverless microservices architecture. It covers merchant onboarding, partner integrations, authentication and authorization, business workflows, notifications, and other critical operational processes.
The team works across platform engineering and business-critical product development, with a focus on scalability, security, reliability, and delivery speed.
Platform engineering and business-critical product development: CI/CD, runtime upgrades, security, authorization, partner notifications, and onboarding features.
The Challenge
Modernize the platform while continuing to deliver business-critical functionality safely and reliably.
- A fragmented CI/CD setup across 10+ repositories
- Outdated Node.js versions and critical dependency vulnerabilities
- Complex authentication and authorization requirements
- Legacy services with extensive business and payment logic
- Unreliable partner integrations that needed real-time communication
- Broken API documentation and test/mock data
- High-priority business changes that had to ship without disrupting existing functionality
What the Team Delivered
CI/CD Modernization
10+ serverless repositories moved from Bitbucket to GitHub Actions, with a standardized build-once, deploy-everywhere process.
- 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 ~650 broken mock/test values across 103 files
Authentication & Authorization
A scalable authorization model for internal services and external clients.
- Database-backed RBAC for roles, permissions, and resource-level access
- Standardized token-based authentication
- Client ID / client secret authentication
- Reusable authentication libraries
- Efficient permission evaluation that scales with the platform
Real-time 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
- Independent delivery processing per partner
- Delivery audit trails, failure monitoring, and team alerts
Each partner is processed independently, so one unavailable system never blocks the rest. Delivery went from minutes or hours to under a second.
Business-critical Product Engineering
Complex business rules in the merchant onboarding platform, such as the “No Deployment” option that 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
16/16 test scenarios passed with no false warnings.
Results and Impact
- CI/CD
- 10+ repositories migrated to GitHub Actions
- Runtime
- 14+ microservices upgraded to Node.js 22
- Security
- Critical dependency vulnerabilities remediated
- Test/mock data
- ~650 values restored across 103 files
- Notifications
- Delivery reduced from minutes/hours to sub-second
- Notification tracking
- 100% of delivery attempts recorded in audit history
- Business validation
- 16/16 test scenarios passed with no false warnings
- Architecture
- Standardized serverless patterns introduced
- Authorization
- Scalable database-backed RBAC implemented
Technical Challenges
- Legacy modernization
- Upgrading 14+ services to Node.js 22 while keeping existing dependencies, plugins, and deployment processes compatible.
- Complex business logic
- Some legacy validation modules hold 5,000+ lines of business and payment rules, so small changes can carry real risk.
- External system reliability
- Partner integrations had to tolerate slow or unavailable external systems without one failure affecting other partners.
- Security
- Critical vulnerabilities had to be remediated and partner-facing functionality protected without breaking changes.
- Data recovery
- A cleanup process affected 650+ mock/test values across 103 files, requiring systematic recovery with production data kept isolated.
Engineering Approach
- Build once, deploy everywhere, so the tested artifact is the deployed artifact
- Reusable serverless patterns for faster new-service development
- Database-backed RBAC for explicit, scalable authorization
- Independent event delivery to isolate partner failures
- Continuous dependency management to address vulnerabilities early
- Business-rule validation before QA to surface edge cases sooner
Technology Stack
Cloud & architecture
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon S3
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS MWAA / Apache Airflow
- AWS IAM
- Serverless Framework
- Docker
Backend & data
- Node.js 22
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- PostgreSQL / MySQL
Frontend
- React
- TypeScript
- Redux
- Vite
- Tailwind CSS
- Keycloak
Testing & security
- Jest
- Playwright
- Snyk
- npm audit
- Dependabot
CI/CD & API
- GitHub Actions
- Make
- OpenAPI / Swagger
- ReDocly
- Claude Code
What This Project Shows
NORTH shows the team combining platform modernization, cloud architecture, security, and product engineering inside a complex legacy environment.
The team owns work across the full delivery lifecycle, from architecture and infrastructure through backend and frontend development, automated testing, security remediation, and production-critical business features, so the platform modernizes without slowing product delivery or compromising reliability.
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