The starting point
The challenge.
Ministry Brands needed to process its own card traffic, and every brand it acquired would bring more. A payment gateway carries compliance obligations, and each new brand risked widening them.
Payments
A payment gateway from scratch that became its own business
The gateway outgrew the company that built it and became a business of its own.
- Engagement
- Full-time at Ministry Brands, employee number seven
- When
- 2014–18
- Stack
A gateway that became a business
Brand ABrand BBrand C
Own tokenOwn tokenOwn token
ONE GATEWAY Separate tokenization per brand
Built from scratch. Spun out as Payment Brands.
Measured
Each figure links to how it was measured.
The change
The result.
The gateway processed the company's card traffic and grew into its own business, Payment Brands, which serves the brands that joined the group. By Austin's account, with no public source, it came to carry $15B+ a year across 90+ brands while the company grew from 14 to 800 developers.
The gateway outgrew the company that built it and became a business of its own.
Inside the work
How the pieces
came together.
A closer look at the decisions and changes behind the result.
- 01
Designed and built the gateway from scratch as a set of ASP.NET services, as employee number seven.
- 02
Gave each brand its own tokenization, so every acquired brand stayed out of its parent's PCI scope.
- 03
Built the staff tooling that onboarded clients onto the gateway, and the pipelines that ran tests and checks before any merge.