PayGreen: Helping shoppers pay it forward with a positive impact for every transaction
About PayGreen
PayGreen is a French online payment gateway for ecommerce businesses, which aims to make sure that every transaction has a positive impact on society and the environment. It allows customers to offset the carbon footprint of their purchases using the Tree algorithm or to donate money to charities of their choice with a payment roundup system called L’Arrondi en Ligne.
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Contact usPayGreen scales to a rapidly growing client base, simplifies compliance management, and enhances security by moving its application to Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Maximizes stability and increases productivity by automating load balancing with Google Kubernetes Engine
- Facilitates compliance with financial regulations through intuitive and detailed tutorials
- Stabilizes costs with a pay-as-you-go pricing plan which increases cost efficiency with every new client added
- Simplifies internal and external testing, streamlining complex modifications through built-in features
Scales platform to handle up to 250 transactions per minute
Do you consider the environmental impact of your decision before hitting the checkout button to make a purchase? If so, you’re not alone. A 2019 CGS survey found that 68% of people consider sustainability when making a purchase. But it’s not always possible to trace the ecological and social footprint of the products you want to buy. Left to your own devices, you’re often forced to do the research yourself or skip the purchase altogether.
Here’s where PayGreen comes in. The innovative ecommerce payment solution allows customers to either complete each purchase with a donation to a cause of their choice, or offset its carbon footprint using an algorithm called Tree. By collating browsing data such as time spent on websites, transportation data such as shipping options, and any data from merchants about their actual products, Tree can display the amount of CO2 generated by a purchase. At checkout, customers can choose to offset their purchase by contributing to an environmental project. Beyond its sustainability focus, PayGreen offers its ecommerce clients an easy-to-use payment gateway that integrates seamlessly with modern platforms. Businesses can both simplify the management of their online payments and improve the customer journey with positive impact tools.
“Because we handle money, it’s crucial that our servers are reliable and downtime-free. Our workloads can change quickly, so flexible pricing is a must. Most of all, we need to comply with financial regulations. Google Cloud offered the best package and won us over with unparalleled compliance features.”
—Stefan Vogel, Chief Marketing Officer, PayGreenWith more than 6,000 customers using the platform, PayGreen is now processing a fast-growing volume of transactions each month. Naturally, its growing client base and increasing transaction volumes pushed the company’s physical servers to the limit. “Our infrastructure was working for our existing clients, but it wasn’t scalable,” says Stefan Vogel, Chief Marketing Officer at PayGreen. “We’re a small team, and could no longer afford to spend so much time maintaining our physical servers.” While it recognized the need to upgrade its infrastructure, as an environmentally conscious company, PayGreen was also keen to find a solution that met those needs.
As co-founder and CTO Renaud Gerson shares, “We were about to get a lot of additional traffic thanks to new, bigger clients joining us. Realizing that our on-premises system wouldn’t be able to handle the load, we decided to move to Google Cloud as a solution that’s both scalable, and carbon-neutral.”
In the fintech environment, security and compliance concerns leave some companies hesitant to embrace a full-scale cloud transformation. To beat this, PayGreen set three key requirements in choosing a provider. “Because we handle money, it’s crucial that our servers are reliable and downtime-free,” explains Stefan. “Our workloads can change quickly, so flexible pricing is a must. Most of all, we need to comply with financial regulations. Google Cloud offered the best package and won us over with unparalleled compliance features.”
After an initial six-month testing phase, PayGreen began its migration in September 2019 with completion set for May 2020. The company took its time to familiarize itself with the Google Cloud product ecosystem, and hired a DevOps engineer to handle the migration internally. The team carries out the actual migration at night, when transactions are the lowest. “It’s going smoothly,” says Stefan. “Google Cloud allows us to run impact tests before we make any changes, keeping disruptions at a minimum.”
“Our team used to manually prepare for peaks or respond to load changes. Now, Google Kubernetes Engine does all that for us, allowing us to be scalable in an automated and autonomous manner.”
—Renaud Gerson, co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, PayGreenScaling big and saving time with Google Kubernetes Engine
Before the migration, PayGreen’s IT team had to monitor the physical servers 24/7, ensuring stable performance regardless of the workload. Today, this task is automated by integrating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with the load-balancing tool Ingress. Now, if a cloud instance exceeds a certain storage threshold, GKE adds a new instance, and if the workload is too low, the instance is closed. By load balancing traffic across multiple instances, PayGreen optimizes availability and scales with the number of transactions.
By implementing GKE, PayGreen has relieved its small team from the pressure of constant server inspection. “Our team used to manually prepare for peaks or respond to load changes,” says Renaud. “Now, Google Kubernetes Engine does all that for us, allowing us to be scalable in an automated and autonomous manner.”
“We’re more efficient overall,” adds Stefan. “Our team members have more time to focus on other important projects, such as continuous integration or testing.”
Much of the testing takes place in the sandbox, where clients conduct their integration checks during the transition period. Internally, the team uses the sandbox to experiment with new deployments and tweak application settings. Before the move to Google Cloud, even simple tweaks involved a laborious process. “We had to log on each server, update certain parameters, and even install new packets,” says Stefan. “We then needed to reboot the web services and the server. It wasn’t just time consuming, it was a constant source of stress for our team.”
With GKE, modifications that used to require complex manual adjustments take mere seconds. “If I want to change a TLS or SSL certificate today, I just have to tick a box,” says Renaud. “It’s very simple, and saves us a lot of time.”
Native compliance, enhanced security
In the financial services industry, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is the definitive compliance standard. Companies must fulfill all fundamental security requirements and withstand regular audits.
The underlying compliance standards of Google Cloud empowered PayGreen to enforce security policies confidently and prioritize customer safety. “If you need to comply with PCI DSS, nothing beats Google Cloud, because everything is already done for you,” says Renaud. “We ended up having to do only 30% of the work ourselves.”
As part of this work, PayGreen must avoid file tampering, a critical indicator of compromise. Google Cloud provides file integrity monitoring (FIM) to examine files, track changes, and alert security if the changes are unauthorized. “When we began implementing PCI DSS, Google Cloud walked us through the implementation with detailed tutorials, best practices, and a constant support channel.”
PayGreen’s old setup required manual supervision around the clock to ensure security and a quick reaction to potential threats. Google Cloud helped centralize the monitoring setup, automating alerts for errors in production. Security Command Center allows PayGreen to track common vulnerabilities with automated security scans and focus on fixes immediately. “Monitoring our classical servers was too complex for comfort,” says Renaud. “Thanks to built-in reporting features of Google Cloud, we know exactly what kinds of errors happen where and how many times. This allows us to keep a close eye on potential security threats.”
“Our company is at a pivotal moment. Whether our clients have 10 or 10 million transactions per minute, Google Cloud helps us offer the best possible service. And as long as there’s a world for us to improve, we’ll be up and running on Google Cloud.”
—Renaud Gerson, co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, PayGreenBigger clients, smaller costs
Security is a question raised by all prospective clients of PayGreen. Beyond the many tangible compliance improvements, working with Google Cloud has helped win over clients that base their decisions at least to an extent on name recognition. “Because we’re a small company, bigger clients tend to be extra careful,” says Renaud. “They have many questions about our infrastructure, wondering if it’s safe and stable. When we tell them we’re on Google Cloud, their doubts vanish.”
Stefan adds, “working with Google Cloud allows us to attract companies we wouldn’t have been able to get in the past. They’re too big for our old system. In that regard, our collaboration has paid off long before the migration was complete.”
But as PayGreen’s client base grows exponentially, expenses won’t. With no up-front costs and a pay-as-you-go pricing plan, the efficient scaling of compute resources will make Google Cloud more cost-effective with each additional client. Already, PayGreen is saving on staff. “Without Google Cloud, we would have needed at least another DevOps engineer by now,” says Stefan. “Generally, we need fewer people to run the system, and as our client base grows, cost savings will become increasingly clear.”
With the migration to GKE complete, PayGreen has begun to explore the Google Cloud ecosystem for new opportunities to improve its services. “We process an enormous amount of data, and sometimes we need to scan it for specific information, which is very complicated today,” says Renaud. “When it comes to big data, Google Cloud opened up possibilities we couldn’t even imagine before.” To visualize and evaluate this data, PayGreen is currently exploring the capabilities of BigQuery and Cloud Bigtable.
Now that the infrastructure is in place and concerns about downtimes and server reliability are a thing of the past, PayGreen can focus on its core mission, to simplify the payment process for online businesses while making a positive impact with every transaction. “Our company is at a pivotal moment,” says Renaud. “Whether our clients have 10 or 10 million transactions per minute, Google Cloud helps us offer the best possible service. And as long as there’s a world for us to improve, we’ll be up and running on Google Cloud.”
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About PayGreen
PayGreen is a French online payment gateway for ecommerce businesses, which aims to make sure that every transaction has a positive impact on society and the environment. It allows customers to offset the carbon footprint of their purchases using the Tree algorithm or to donate money to charities of their choice with a payment roundup system called L’Arrondi en Ligne.