Case study

Geidea – Payment Solution Provider

Geidea, a leading PSP in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and UAE transformed its core transaction accounting system through SDK.finance on-premise ledger layer software.

Integrating it with their existing POS software allowed our customer company to see the whole payment cycle in detail, from acceptance and reconciliation to settlement and payout ensuring transparency for the money flow and everyday accounting.

Project overview

Supporting cashless payments targets, and making the payments acceptance process transparent and seamless for their customers was the foundational vision that led Geidea to embark on the transformation of their core transaction accounting system. The goal was not only to deliver this improved experience to the customers fast but also at scale.

A customer company story

Geidea is the leading provider that delivers solutions for digital banking, business management, Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals and payment acceptance for financial institutions and SMBs in the KSA. They serve over 150,000+ merchants, support more than 700,000+ payment terminals and process over 4 million transactions daily.

Driven by the mission to make payments and commerce technology accessible, affordable and user-friendly, the company supports both big players and small businesses, enabling them to accept both online and in-store payments, use e-wallets as well as offers inventory, sales, order management tools and much more, all from a single app.

Geidea transformed digital payments within the SME space with the launch of its technology that turns smartphones into POS terminals. With the goal of scaling the technology across the MENA region, it partnered with global payment institutions — like Mastercard, Visa and one of the major banks in the country.

The company continues its expansion into other countries of the region to support the goal of financial inclusion for all. It also partners with other fintechs to offer a suite of tailored payment solutions for local companies across the banking, retail, food, wholesale, hospitality, and healthcare sectors.

The Challenge

Geidea’s management was on the lookout for a software vendor to replace their legacy transaction accounting system. They needed ledger layer software that could revamp their existing accounting process at the core.

This move would not only provide merchants with a clear representation of their balances and settlement process, leading to improved customer experience, but also open the way towards market share growth within their country and offer opportunities for expansion abroad.

Growth and expansion into new markets

Obtain a future-proof solution to support growth

The existing legacy system wasn’t covering the company’s needs and restricted the future business growth.

Ensure enhanced integration capabilities

The company was limited to one acquiring bank which meant less versatility and higher service fees for customers using other banks, and business evolution restrictions for the company itself.

Multiply the system’s scalability

The existing system’s architecture limited its ability to sustain the growing number of customers and couldn’t handle a surge of new products and solutions introduced.

Customer experience boost

Reshape customer balance breakdown

The previous accounting process that relied in the most part on the acquiring bank, lacked transparency and clarity in terms of the settlement for end-users and access to their account statements

Automate the reconciliation process

The backend system in place didn’t provide the functionality of automated reconciliations for customer accounts, which therefore required considerable manual efforts.

Business operations modernization

Introduce a new accounting system

This would allow to automate payments settlement, ensure faster payments and efficient transaction status tracking.

Adapt the software for the business workflow

Equipping the team with a convenient work environment would increase overall productivity and work satisfaction.

Develop a transaction accounting model

The model based on SDK.finance’s system was to structure the data collected by the system, ensuring role-based access to the data for platform users.

SDK.finance transaction core already had the ledgering functionality, so it was customized to collect the transaction information from the POS, link it to a particular merchant account, and track the transaction status in the bank till the money is in the merchant’s account.

Create a back-office for end-users

To simplify work with the new transaction accounting system for Geidea’s staff and customers, a built-in functionality of the SDK.finance platform was used to introduce the back-office for transactions analysis, management, and history view for the customer’s team.

Also, a convenient back-office for merchants was implemented, providing merchants with access to their transaction history and payment details.

Implement a role-based system access

An actors model was introduced, with specific access levels for different system roles. It allowed to facilitate the merchants onboarding and simplified managing the access to the data based on the user’s role in the company.

Extend the system's integration capabilities

Initially, Geidea worked exclusively with one of the local banks, relying on their subaccount system. This posed a challenge for transaction reconciliation, the bank being the only source of truth for the transaction details, as the customer did not collect their own transaction statistics for analysis and forecasting.

Incorporating SDK.finance solution opened up opportunities for integration with other banks, as it introduced subwallets for merchants, enabling our customer company to collect and analyze the transaction data on their side, which resulted in faster and more accurate transactions settlement.

Enable online payment acceptance

Geidea was eager to increase its market share by servicing ecommerce merchants, which was achieved via MPGS (Mastercard Payment Gateway Services) integration. It also allowed to track and settle payments from the checkout via the merchant’s e-commerce platform.

Build a fees configuration functionality

Originally, changing the system commissions and fees required additional development and redeploying. Based on the SDK.finance platform built-in fees and limits management functionality, a customized solution was implemented, allowing changes the commission fees in real-time without changing the source code and redeployment.

Construct an architecture solution for scalability

The SDK.finance solution replaced the legacy system and accounting model without data migration or using old components. This allowed the new system to be built on the modern architecture using a cutting-edge technology stack.

It also shaped a new PDLC and SDLC (Product Development Life Cycle and Software Development Life Cycle) with a great potential for software updates, new functionality and scale.

Infrastructure and code quality monitoring was introduced for greater security.

Get a reliable source of data on all transactions

The existing system did not allow linking the sums of payments accepted with the payout received to a merchant’s IBAN to compare with the data provided by the bank.

Define the commission and the profit amount

This was needed to structure the merchant payment data sent to the bank and the commissions they paid, plus understand the profit received by a customer.

Change fees and limits without changing the source code

Initially, setting up custom commissions for specific transactions wasn’t easy. The customer company needed the adapted built-in functionality to be able to change the fees and limits with ease, according to the company’s business needs.

Structure product level access

This step was essential to secure sensitive business information, ensure the “four-eyes principle” and facilitate daily work process for the team members by distributing the responsibility of the operational and financial team.

Improve financial reporting process

Geidea kept a strategic perspective of the product and company development.

A thorough reporting and monitoring functionality would allow to track the processes from A to Z and handle any operational exceptions changing the source code, plus seriously decrease the amount of menial effort for financial performance monitoring.

Why did Geidea choose SDK.finance software?

SDK.finance digital wallet software was the solution that could cater for all of these requirements for several reasons:

The right functionality

SDK.finance offers a versatile fintech platform, capable of catering for any payment business need through its extensive customization capabilities, cutting-edge technology stack and high code quality.

No vendor lock-in

Coming with the source code license, SDK.finance software made a robust foundation for the new accounting system and allowed to bring about a more holistic approach to reconciliation and settlement, and finally, payouts without vendor lock-in.

API-first approach

Through API-first approach, integrating SDK.finance platform with the customer company’s system components and third-party services could be achieved in a shorter time-span and at a lower cost.

High scalability

The SDK.finance solution allows our customer to focus on expanding its market share, without any infrastructure-related issues.

The Process

Geidea’s sophisticated requirements and an already mature existing business process called for custom features development on top of the existing SDK.finance platform, performed by a team of seasoned professionals made up both of SDK.finance and the customer company’s staff.

The key milestones on the roadmap:

Creating payments within the new transaction accounting system by integrating with the company’s POS network.
Implementing a system for automated payment reconciliation.
Creating a merchant’s back-office to ensure instant access to their account balance, POS list, transactions history and payout report.
Implementing flexible fees and commission configuration functionality, to define the company’s profit by differentiating between a total and bank commission related to operation processing.
Automating payouts to a merchant’s IBAN once the money is settled through the bank.
Allowing merchants to auto-deduct loan payments from their payouts till the loan is paid.
Integration with the MasterCard Payment Gateway Service to allow merchants to accept online payments.

Business outcome

SDK.finance helped to reimagine the technology and processes behind Geidea’s accounting system and launch a revitalized scalable future-proof solution.

Through cooperation with SDK.finance, a new accounting system based on the ledger layer software is now integrated with an extensive network of Geidea POS terminals across several countries in the MENA region.

More efficient accounting

The new accounting process ensures that our customer can keep track of the entire payment lifecycle and has detailed information on all the financial operations, payouts and profit.

Enhanced customer experience

Using the APIs provided by the new ledger software, the customer company has dramatically boosted its UX.
The modernized intuitive backoffice empowers merchants to have exhaustive info on their balance and transactions at their fingertips. The details cover an entire payment flow – from the funds paid by customers to settled payouts received to a merchant’s IBAN and the commission amount.

Extended bank partnerships

Rather than staying with just one acquiring bank, implementing a new core accounting system eliminated bank integration barriers, enabling partnership with the majority of local banks, which extended their offering to match their customers’ banking preferences.

Higher volume of processed transactions

Being able to process a growing volume of daily transactions (4+ million, as of 2022) without a hiccup makes Geidea a perfect choice for both retail startups and online ecommerce giants.

Improved scalability

Expanded target market

Mastercard Payment Gateway Services integration allowed the business to scale, capture e-commerce segments and acquire more merchants, becoming a leading provider of payment acceptance services in the KSA.

Boundless growth opportunities

With key challenges handled using the software solution by SDK.finance, Geidea can execute its planned expansion into other countries, being sure its platform will cope with the scale and is agile enough for adding new components, should they be needed in the future.

The reimagined project architecture and robust transaction processing unlocked the integration with other platforms within the customer’s system, such as the merchant management system, payment gateway and turned it all into a powerful universal product ecosystem.

Along with its advanced technology stack, refined PDLC, modernized infrastructure, SDK.finance system creates an environment for predictable growth and expansion into new markets.

All of the above-mentioned improvements, along with proactive development of their other products, helped our customer to become a leading provider of payment acceptance services locally in the KSA, with the market share of 75% and continue their expansion on the markets of other countries like the UAE within the MENA region.