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Kipp Eyes E-commerce Opportunity Through Real-Time Payment Approval

According to eMarketer, “worldwide e-commerce sales will exceed $5 trillion for the first time, accounting for more than a fifth of overall retail sales” in 2022. With independent, Main Street shop owners to global retailers competing fiercely for the same shoppers, these businesses need to be able to fight for every legitimate sale to be completed. However, global payments consultancy CMPSI estimated in 2020, “only 85% of online transactions being approved, compared to 97% in-store.”

When a fintech innovator needed the blazing speed of an in-memory database with guaranteed backup and redundancy it turned to Redis Enterprise Cloud on AWS.

CMPSI also notes the ramifications of this disparity, noting, ”transactions that are turned away, over 50% of customers will take their business to a competitor.” Seeing a massive opportunity, the founders of Kipp are seeking to deliver greater collaboration in the payment approval process between credit issuers and merchants to ultimately deliver a better experience for online shoppers.

Because time is of the essence in authorizing a sale before a shopper may choose to take their business elsewhere, Kipp turned to Redis Enterprise Cloud on AWS. Beyond the performance Redis is known for, as a startup, Kipp required a proven, fully managed service that offers guaranteed backup and redundancy to enable their team to focus on the challenge of optimizing the payment flow between e-commerce merchants and credit card-issuing banks.

Providing collaborative online credit approval to shoppers in milliseconds

A significant portion of e-commerce business is being lost, in part, because technology limits collaboration between credit lenders and merchants. Everybody is losing in this system. The shopper doesn’t get what they want, sellers don’t sell, and bankers don’t get their investment opportunity.

“E-commerce merchants and their card-issuing banks love that we help them recapture more good business by delighting their customers. Redis brings a major part of that value proposition and allows us to rapidly scale without jeopardizing our superior customer experience.”

Nir Levy, Co-founder & CTO, Kipp Ltd.

Typically, a purchase is declined for two basic rationales; first, the customer doesn’t have enough funds, and second, the transaction falls outside their policy or is suspected to be fraudulent.

Legacy code and infrastructure don’t allow merchants to be more proactive in helping issuers of credit understand the credit risk of customers. It also doesn’t allow merchants to share the cost of risk if they wish to save the transaction. Because loan decisions are traditionally based on entrenched credit and risk policies, real-time environmental data that could affect a new understanding is absent from the process.

The challenge is to leverage the insight and business interests of the merchant to optimize for a decision to meet the needs of each stakeholder: The customer, the merchant, and the bank.

With e-commerce transactions becoming more challenging because today’s shoppers are demanding very fast system responses, any credit approval process must therefore take place in milliseconds, allowing for internet traffic. 

Kipp’s aim is to design a system that automates real-time collaboration between merchants and banks. Their challenge was to find the technology to ensure it was viable. 

Negotiating credit approvals and payment authorization in real-time

After evaluating various databases, including open-source Redis, the combination of blazing speed and high availability from Redis Enterprise Cloud met Kipp’s system design imperatives. 

As an additional bonus, Redis is a widely approved and used data platform across the financial industry, so it doesn’t require their team to validate with banks and credit issuers.

Their solution, Kipp Connect, is designed to deliver intelligent, customer-friendly credit decisions, so Redis made an ideal engine delivering real-time processing. The entire process requires fetching the pre-defined policy (business rules) of both the shopper’s credit-issuer bank and the merchant. Because these organizations work with different sets of data, Kipp’s AI platform needs the data-sharing to be real-time so the decision-making can happen within the timeframe of the transaction.

Kipp & Redis: A Snapshot

  • Redis Enterprise Cloud serves as an in-memory data processing layer to synthesize consumer meta data with AI-generated bank lending policy data stored in MongoDB.

  • The core functionality of Redis Enterprise Cloud allows Kipp’s developers to develop a collaborative e-commerce platform that is blazing fast and a data platform widely used within the financial industry.

  • Redis’ managed service ensures Kipp’s availability and speed always meet the expectation of three transaction participants: the lender, the seller, and ultimately the customers they share.

Because the user experience is the ultimate measure of success, system redundancy or availability is of equal importance as Redis’ speed of operation. Redis Enterprise Cloud ensures more than just system resilience. As a fully managed service it includes automated configuration and proactive maintenance to ensure the environment is always operating at peak performance. Optimization routines make scalability as simple as a point-and-click for a startup like Kipp.

Innovating paytech at the speed of Redis

Kipp’s founders believe their ultimate innovation will be to enable merchants to participate in the risk with banks to help close the gap in declined e-commerce transactions. Because of the expectations of the modern digital consumer, performance and availability is essential. Redis Enterprise Cloud is ensuring Kipp can meet the requirements of merchants, credit issuers, and ultimately their shared customers.

Learn how Redis is empowering retailers and financial services companies to win in the real-time economy. Request a meeting with a Redis expert today or start for free.