Built a PCI-DSS certified vault in three months leveraging Google Cloud managed services and security building blocks
Gave merchants greater flexibility to switch providers and optimize transaction routing
Delivered enterprise-grade security without compromising on availability or low-latency performance
Strengthened data foundation with BigQuery, paving the way for advanced AI-driven use cases
Purse leverages Google Cloud’s infrastructure, encryption, and network isolation services to deliver an independent payment card vault that frees merchants from payment processor lock-in.
Purse leverages Google Cloud’s infrastructure, encryption, and network isolation services to deliver an independent payment card vault that frees merchants from payment processor lock-in.
Google Cloud: An enterprise-grade foundation for mission-critical payments
In ecommerce, the entire customer journey hinges on the checkout experience. An awkward interface, a missing payment method, a declined card—the slightest friction can instantly cause a lost sale. Founded in 2021 within Association Familiale Mulliez (Decathlon, Auchan, Leroy Merlin, Boulanger), Purse ensures that a shopping cart is never abandoned because of payment friction.
Purse's formula? A platform connected to over 100 payment providers and methods that centralizes and orchestrates every transaction flow. "Where direct integration with a single processor locks a merchant into a closed ecosystem—with all the drawbacks that entails in terms of downtime, price hikes, or lower acceptance rates—we are rewriting the rules of payment through orchestration," explains Samuel Delplace, Head of Infrastructure and Security at Purse. "Based on the purchasing context—basket contents, geography, device, and risk profile—our platform dynamically presents the most relevant payment options with the smoothest user experience."
In practice, Purse tailors payment methods to each specific purchase: installment plans or bank transfers for high-value carts, digital wallets on mobile, and saved cards for recurring everyday purchases. Once the shopper clicks "Pay," smart routing directs the transaction through the optimal path based on processing cost, fraud risk, and partner uptime. If a transaction fails, smart cascading immediately reroutes it to an alternative rail. Purse operates deep within the payment processing chain—where dozens of players interact across heterogeneous protocols—to detect errors instantly and find the path that succeeds.
The platform integrates seamlessly with no custom development required: merchants simply configure their business rules and priorities, while Purse orchestrates the mechanics behind the scenes.
Where direct integration with a single processor locks a merchant into a closed ecosystem—with all the drawbacks that entails in terms of downtime, price hikes, or lower acceptance rates—we are rewriting the rules of payment through orchestration.
Samuel Delplace
Head of Infrastructure and Security, Purse
From day one, Purse chose Google Cloud for its high-performance, resilient, and secure infrastructure. "We needed an environment capable of handling massive traffic surges, such as Black Friday peaks, while meeting the stringent security standards unique to online payments," notes Samuel Delplace.
Purse is now taking merchant autonomy a step further with Vault, a dedicated vault that stores payment cards directly on its platform. "To maximize conversion rates, nothing beats a saved card: returning shoppers simply click to pay," explains Delplace. "However, when a customer saves a card on a retail site, that card data is typically held in the proprietary environment of the payment provider processing transactions for that merchant. If the retailer later decides to switch providers, returning customers lose their saved cards. With Vault, we change the game: card data is stored independently on our platform. The merchant preserves the effortless one-click checkout experience for shoppers while remaining free to route each transaction to whichever partner offers the best availability, performance, or pricing. This delivers on our core promise: giving merchants complete freedom while maximizing the success rate of every payment."
However, storing credit card data requires strict compliance with PCI-DSS, the industry's most rigorous security benchmark. Multi-layered encryption, key management, access controls, network segmentation, end-to-end auditing—beneath the vault's seamless exterior lies an exceptionally demanding architecture.
Protecting every data point, securing every access layer
"The challenge was far greater than simply spinning up a credit card database," recalls Delplace. "We had to fulfill more than 500 individual controls and requirements, implement multiple encryption layers, manage keys with extreme precision, and enforce strict separation of duties to technically prevent any single person from accessing cardholder data. The richness of the Google Cloud ecosystem and its suite of PCI-DSS-compliant services were critical game-changers: while some companies take over two years to build a card vault, we did it in just three months."
The richness of the Google Cloud ecosystem and its suite of PCI-DSS-compliant services were critical game-changers: while some companies take over two years to build a card vault, we did it in just three months.
Samuel Delplace
Head of Infrastructure and Security, Purse
Purse designed a serverless architecture running on Cloud Run, where every microservice is strictly isolated and all communication is granularly controlled. Private Service Connect establishes private connections exclusively between authorized services, while network microsegmentation, Secure Web Proxy, and least-privilege access policies restrict traffic and permissions to what is strictly necessary.
Upstream, Cloudflare inspects and filters inbound traffic before routing it to Vault services using mutual TLS (mTLS), encrypting data in transit and authenticating system identities prior to connection. Cloud Load Balancing then distributes traffic across services, backed by managed SSL certificates.
Card data is encrypted across multiple tiers before storage in MongoDB Atlas, with Cloud KMS handling encryption key lifecycle and protection. Merchants never handle raw card numbers; instead, they interact with secure tokens that represent the card without allowing the underlying credentials to be exposed.
During transaction processing, Memorystore for Valkey loads required payment data into low-latency in-memory storage, which is automatically flushed the moment the transaction settles.
"By adopting this high-security architecture, we did far more than check a compliance box: we built a vault that safeguards mission-critical data without adding latency or compromising the checkout flow. Achieving this so rapidly was made possible by Google Cloud experts who guided our architectural decisions, and by managed services that provided battle-tested, pre-compliant building blocks operated at global scale," says Delplace.
Turning payment expertise into an innovation engine
With Vault, Purse provides merchants with greater agility and operational control. If a provider raises fees or suffers an outage, the retailer dynamically routes around it without breaking the one-click checkout experience. This independence boosts merchant resilience, giving them access to industry-standard security without the operational overhead.
For Purse, this milestone is equally strategic. As the payment industry transitions to the heightened standards of PCI DSS v4.0.1, achieving Level 1 certification from day one positions the fintech as a market leader, proving its technical maturity to demanding enterprise clients.
Looking ahead, Purse is expanding its data platform on BigQuery to extract richer insights across transactions. While machine learning powers core production workflows today—particularly around payment routing and fraud scoring—generative AI models will soon expand these capabilities. Working with Google Cloud teams, the fintech is exploring Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to unlock new performance efficiencies and deliver intelligent recommendations to merchants.
Google Cloud allows us to innovate iteratively with total architectural freedom. We can leverage managed services to move fast, then seamlessly integrate custom components as our needs and internal expertise evolve—without disrupting production. That continuous agility is invaluable for a fintech that must move at high velocity while maintaining uncompromising security standards.
Samuel Delplace
Head of Infrastructure and Security, Purse
"Google Cloud allows us to innovate iteratively with total architectural freedom. We can leverage managed services to move fast, then seamlessly integrate custom components as our needs and internal expertise evolve—without disrupting production. That continuous agility is invaluable for a fintech that must move at high velocity while maintaining uncompromising security standards," concludes Samuel Delplace.
It is this technological agility that Purse will continue to leverage to give merchants full ownership over their payment stack and deliver an effortless checkout experience to end consumers.
Founded in 2021, Purse provides a customer identity (CIAM), consent, and payment orchestration platform for ecommerce leaders. Its solution orchestrates end-to-end transactional workflows—from customer authentication to payment completion—within a secure, controlled environment to maximize security, traceability, and conversion performance.
Industry: Fintech
Location: France
Products: Cloud Run, Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS), Private Service Connect, Secure Web Proxy, Cloud Load Balancing, Memorystore for Valkey, BigQuery
