Overview

Our team was engaged by a government-backed organization to help design and implement a national payment security portal for large-scale public transport operations. The goal was to provide a single, secure platform for managing payments, guarantees, and risk between transport authorities, operators, and a central payment security entity.

We owned the architecture and solution design from the early requirement workshops through to the detailed design milestone, defining how React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Linux-based servers would come together into a compliant, scalable platform.

Context & Our Role

The client runs the financial backstop for long-term service contracts with multiple transport authorities across the country. The portal needed to reflect complex scheme rules, support hundreds of concurrent users, and comply with strict government standards for security, accessibility, and open technologies.

Our responsibility was to translate dense specifications into a clear, implementable architecture and define milestones guiding development and operations over a multi-year contract.

Key Challenges

Mapping legal and policy-heavy rules into precise system behaviour.
Designing multi-party workflows without UI complexity.
Meeting strict uptime, security, and auditability requirements.
Ensuring vendor-agnostic and integration-ready architecture.

Approach

The engagement followed formal milestones aligned with contractual scope. The architecture used a three-layer web model with React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and hardened Linux servers.

Security & Compliance

We defined strong identity verification, RBAC, full audit trails, encrypted communications, and independent security assessments.

Impact

The result was a unified national payment-security portal design that de-risked compliance, standardized workflows, and provided a clear roadmap for long-term operations.

Designing a National-Scale Payment Security Portal for Public Transport

Designing a National-Scale Payment Security Portal for Public Transport