Manual to Modern: The Complete Payment History Transformation

The Challenge

Our client, one of North America's largest auto finance companies, faced significant operational inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction due to an outdated, manual, letter-based payment history service. This legacy system relied on manual data extraction from siloed databases, leading to:

• High Manual Effort & Cost: Customer care representatives spent considerable time manually pulling information and printing letters, incurring additional operational costs.

• Data Inaccuracy & Errors: The manual process was prone to errors, leading to incorrect or incomplete payment histories.

• Poor Customer Experience: Customers struggled to access their full payment history easily, leading to frequent complaints and potential churn. The existing online system only showed digital payments, excluding crucial transactions like checks and in-store payments.

• Lack of Real-time Data: The absence of a direct API meant non-real-time data, which was no longer applicable in the fast-paced financial landscape.

• Compliance & Security Concerns: Operating in a highly regulated industry, the manual system posed ongoing security and compliance challenges.

If these issues remained unaddressed, the client risked significant customer churn, negative impact on their Net Promoter Score (NPS), and increased operational costs, ultimately losing ground to more digitally advanced competitors.

Our Solution

Our approach focused on modernizing the client's payment history system by integrating it within their existing IT roadmap, leveraging microservices architecture, and establishing seamless integration with their Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform.

Key Components of the Solution

Modern Technology Stack:

• Frontend: AEM application, utilizing HTL, CSS, and jQuery for UI, with data fetching implemented via the JAVA Sling framework.

• Backend: ASP.NET Core Application following the CQRS pattern.

• Data Caching: Redis for efficient data caching.

• Version Control & CI/CD: Azure DevOps for version control and Azure Pipelines for continuous integration and deployment.

• Lazy Loading & Pagination: We revolutionized the data retrieval process by implementing lazy loading and server-side pagination. Instead of fetching all data to the frontend, the system now retrieves only the necessary page data on demand, significantly improving efficiency and scalability for large datasets. This replaced the inefficient client-side pagination.

• Custom UI Components: Developed custom dropdown and pagination components using HTL, CSS, and JavaScript, providing a cleaner and more efficient approach to data propagation.

• Streamlined Data Propagation: Handled data propagation directly from the JavaScript layer, moving away from Sling-based methods for a more streamlined approach.

• Robust Development & Deployment: The team took ownership of the development and deployment cycles, cleaning up unnecessary AEM classes and components and establishing a clear reference for future AEM development.

Implementation Timeline

What could take months was accomplished in just 13 weeks! The project launched in February 2025 and crossed the finish line by May's end - a testament to razor-sharp planning, relentless execution, and uncompromising commitment to deadlines.

Results & Impact

Our solution delivered significant quantifiable and qualitative improvements for the client:

• Eliminated Manual Processes: The manual effort of customer service representatives in servicing payment history requests was eliminated, leading to substantial cost savings associated with printing letters and manual intervention.

• Enhanced User Experience: The new system provides customers with easy access to their full, real-time payment history, leading to improved customer satisfaction and a positive impact on NPS scores (to be measured via online surveys).

• Improved Scalability: The implementation of lazy loading and pagination dramatically enhanced the system's scalability, allowing for efficient data transfer on demand, even with huge amounts of data (currently capped at 25 records per page). This future-proofs the solution for continued growth.

• Increased Reliability: Unit tests were implemented on the backend APIs, and detailed logs were put in place for effective error monitoring, enhancing system reliability.

• Adaptability & Collaboration: The client highly valued our team's adaptability in handling changing requirements and enjoyed the collaborative approach, which allowed them to test the solution in parts as it was built.

• Future Growth Positioning: The basic MVP solution frees up human resources for tasks that genuinely require human attention, positioning the client for future growth and innovation.

Technical Achievements

• Overcoming AEM Complexity: Successfully navigated the complex and often undocumented AEM local setup, code build, and deployment processes, resolving intricate interdependencies and project structure issues that caused random build failures.

• API Layer Optimization: Streamlined data propagation across incomplete implementations of over three API layers, introducing lazy loading modules for optimization.

• Fixing Caching Inconsistencies: Re-implemented pagination logic and set up Redis locally to resolve inconsistencies in the service ACL caching, which had previously prevented pagination from working as expected.

• Innovative Data Fetching: Shifted from fetching all data to the frontend to a server-side lazy loading approach, significantly improving performance and scalability.

Client Testimonial

"Very adaptable, able to handle changing requirements, enjoyed the collaboration and were able to test the solution in parts as we built it."

Conclusion

This project successfully transformed a cumbersome, manual payment history process into a modern, scalable, and user-friendly digital solution.

By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and a collaborative approach, we not only addressed the client's immediate challenges but also positioned them for sustained growth.

This modern, user-centric solution doesn't just process payments - it drives customer satisfaction, reduces operational costs, and creates sustainable competitive differentiation in an increasingly digital marketplace.