Dr. Tuuli Bell

So I'm Tuuli Bell from Tasktop. In fact, I was brought here by our partner, Intellica. Neil is over there, but we were told we should only have two people on stage, given the size of the stage, which is fine.

Let's go to the first slide. Which way should I point this at? We might be out of battery. Perfect. There are some pictures also.

What we'll do is introductions first, then a very short agenda, and then go into a little bit more detail. Most of the presentation today we'll do in a little bit of an interview style. James knows very much, obviously, about their journey, their value stream integration journey in DevOps at Worldpay. I will speak more generally about how our customers generally see DevOps and value stream integration.

At the end, we'll try and reserve a couple of minutes for questions. If there's no time, or if there's something that you want to ask afterwards, I'll be at the booth downstairs and/or somewhere around at the conference. I'm on the app as well, so you'll be able to find me.

Over to you.

James Percival

I'll follow on with the introductions. Hi, guys. My name's James Percival. I'm a senior project manager at Worldpay, working on the new acquiring platform.

This, as Tuuli said, will be a bit of a journey about our roadmap over the last couple of years and where we're looking to get in the next two or three.

The new acquiring platform in itself is Worldpay's largest project that we're doing, rebuilding our payment processing system from scratch to meet our ambitions of being an independent company by 2020. Through this, I think over the next couple of slides we'll show you how, working with Intellica and working with Tasktop, we've been able to integrate some more of our processes and start on our journey towards a continuous integration and DevOps lifecycle.

Next slide, please.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Thank you.

What we'll do is we'll take a look at Worldpay, because I don't know, hands up how many of you know about Worldpay? Perfect. That's a very good start. It's a nice start for me anyway. That's a really good start.

Then we'll talk about the goal of the whole journey, and then we'll take a look at what that consisted of. Obviously, everyone has got challenges. What really excites me as well is the future. The journey's been taking a couple of years, a number of years, and now we're at the present here. Let's take a look at what we've achieved, and then let's take a look at the future. What do we want to achieve from the future as well?

James Percival

I'm happy that so many of you stuck your hands up already, but if you don't know about Worldpay, we are a merchant acquirer and a payment processor. There's a very high likelihood that you've used us probably today, maybe over your weekend.

As it stands, we are one of the largest merchant acquirers in Europe. We process around 31 million transactions daily at a value of about $402 billion over the course of the year, across 126 currencies, 326 payment methods, and 400,000 merchants.

We're really trying to scale out our footprint. I'd like to think we are already Worldpay, but there's definitely more of an effort over the next two years to really increase our footprint and get to be known as the company that our namesake says.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

What struck me here was the 326 payment methods. If you think about your wallets, if you have an iPhone, you might have Apple Pay, you might have Android Pay, various different things. If you think a couple of years back, you might have just had a credit card. But you've probably seen this trend of increasing a number of payment methods.

Is there anything you'd like to add on that?

James Percival

Absolutely. We'll cover it a bit more in the slides coming up, but we are in the process now of being able to build our capacity to react to the trends of not only today, but possibly tomorrow.

We're looking to build our platform in a scalable way that we can incorporate not only your traditional bank cards, but perhaps look at things like taking Bitcoin, taking local currencies, alternative finance, that kind of thing, to pay for merchant services or product. It's all part of our step to move forward as the leader in the payments landscape.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Let's start with the goal.

If you think of your own organization where you work, you probably have some kind of strategy, whether you know that very well or not, or whether that's changed much over the past couple of years. A lot of those goals will have a lot of similarities.

When I started having conversations with James, we really wanted to boil that down into a couple of key strategies, those key goals. In fact, you can find the first one, the customer experience one, if you go to the Worldpay website and look at their vision, their corporate vision, corporate strategy. You can see really the focus on customer experience. That was the first one that struck me as a very important message.

Also, given especially when you're working in finance, you really are focusing on that cost aspect as well. Sometimes when you think of having that, not maybe collision, but you're thinking, let's think about the customer. We really want to enhance that customer experience, but at the same time we want to be cost efficient. We want to really look at how we can save costs, how we can maybe do more with less.

Then the third one, as we're at a DevOps conference, but even if we weren't, is agility. I think that was one of the biggest transformations and one of the biggest parts where the employees and the customers as well could see the change in that speed and in that agility. The change from being quite slow but effective, then going into a much faster pace.

James Percival

I think it's good to have a bit of background here.

From 2008, RBS divested in Worldpay, and it presented us with this opportunity to really establish ourselves as an independent company and move away from a legacy platform that served us well for 30, 40 years.

You don't get this opportunity every 10 years. It really was a groundbreaking moment for us to rebuild our payment capacity from scratch, putting the customers at the center of our vision of being able to scale it out, incorporate new trends, new themes in the market.

Building this from scratch allowed us to move our scalability forwards, step into not only today and away from a legacy mainframe system, but into something that could grow with time, new trends, new payments, and essentially react faster and more flexibly than ever before.

It's allowed us to deliver merchant insights on every trade, every transaction that our customers, your merchants, might look at, and essentially provide not only an added benefit of being able to react to real-time payments information for a merchant, but also deliver the stability that's already been there. Adding extra value add, I think we like to brand it.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

If we take a look at that, when you said add a payment method for a merchant, for example, and you're thinking of the value stream of, let's start with, we have a requirement here. Someone needs something new. They want a new payment method, for example, or they want a new service and so forth.

Obviously that then goes through the whole cycle of, you have to obviously build it and test it, and then build it and test it again, and so forth. If you look before the transformation, how long was that cycle?

James Percival

Worldpay in itself has come a long way in the last two years.

We've been working off an enormously waterfall mentality, so getting a product to market in itself could take months of development, months of testing, quality assurance, recycle that, and again and again until we come to an enormous code drop that inevitably goes into live.

When you look at other conferences that have been going on today, the business get all shaky around it, and you've got to make sure that you are really setting the expectation of what's going to be there whilst making sure we're delivering to our clients on time and as expected.

Within this journey, we're looking to cut that time down from months, and already we've managed to cut it to weeks. We'd like to get to the position where we can do daily uploads to production, taking away from large code drops, smaller, more frequent integration points, and essentially providing a better service with less downtime for anyone who uses our products, our services.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Let's cover these two points, which I think are linked as well here, about manual reconciliation work and duplicated work effort. I think that links greatly with having that opportunity, or being able to spend that time and spend that money, for proactive activities.

Rather than spend a lot of time, for example, in duplicating efforts or doing something manually, you then release that time and get to do other things.

James Percival

I don't know how many people love admin, but personally, if you're spending your time mapping your effort across multiple systems, making sure that your project managers know what's going on, when really you should be spending your time doing what you like to do, developing, testing, whatever, providing a linkage between our systems and the tools that we use on a daily basis actually frees up capacity, obviously. But it makes people happier at work too, which I think is a really big thing for us.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Thanks.

In terms of the goals: agility, the customer experience, and the cost. Anyone else has got similar goals? Cost, for example? Agility? Yeah, I think most people would like to be more agile if possible. Customer experience? Anyone focusing on customer experience? Yeah, I would like to hope so.

Now we have the goal in mind, so we understand where we want to be. Let's take a look at your journey. Go ahead and start.

James Percival

I think we've come a long way in the two years that I've worked with Worldpay.

NAP in itself, the acquiring platform, has had a few false starts, but we are now happy and proud to say that we've got a new platform in live. We are processing over a million pounds' worth of transactions a day on a rather small subset of our merchant books. So we've come a hell of a long way.

Key to getting this into production and to aligning it with our business goals, we didn't really want to go in all guns blazing because it was an enormous change in the working mentality that we have and an upgrade in the systems that our services and service users have been working on.

Really, we had to align this to our business goals and our business expectations of reducing the transition to a seamless transition for our customers, reducing the amount of uncertainty, supporting our staff through the transition in itself, and being able to minimize disruption to the live services that we already have out.

In order to do that, we looked at this by possibly doing a phased build and a phased migration. We targeted this around our customer base, looking at receptiveness to change, ability to use certain aspects of our functionality. Do they take certain card types? Do they use payment gateways? Do they route certain reports to us? Can we then build and phase our delivery into a testing cycle, into a migration by the customers that we're looking to target?

As I mentioned earlier, this was an enormously waterfall challenge. It was months' worth of work, enormous feedback loops, and enormous quality assurance and testing cycles that we needed to get over.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

One of the challenges you mentioned as well, and as part of that journey, you have a number of different streams. You have these new and exciting initiatives and new and exciting requests, but at the same time you still have to support all those initial service requests and initial ongoing maintenance work as well.

Even though this is one diagram, you are doing, I guess it's kind of like under the phased build, so you were doing that in a number of phases, correct? And still ongoing.

James Percival

There's a number of phases. Really, if you look at the project in itself, it actually could be split down into five or six smaller projects. You look at having a customer resource management, an invoicing and reconciliation, a payment scheme clearing side of things.

Some of these could take years to do properly with a dedicated team, and we're trying to roll six projects into one here. When you have such a large amount of effort, a large number of team members and colleagues working on things concurrently, you're inevitably going to get integration issues, which is one of the banes of our project and our existence at the moment, but we're trying to overcome.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Thank you. Let's go to the challenges.

Now we're aligning the challenges with the goals because as the goals appear... Can I? Yep. Let me just show all of those at once.

Within the program challenges, these are quite similar challenges that we see in our customer base as well. Even though lots of people do talk about DevOps, you talk about Agile, you talk about all the Lean, you talk about all the different initiatives, you talk about different approaches. You might combine service management, you might combine lots of different frameworks.

A lot of our customers do have issues with having that legacy, whatever that might be, especially having a very waterfall program management. That's definitely something that we do see, which is fine when it works with everything else alongside it.

Then the collaboration, I think that's something that is great to be here today, especially because obviously you're not our direct customer, you're a partner customer. It's great as a partner manager to be here and to really collaborate, not with just our direct customers, but also indirect and with our partners. I think that's the key to any success really, is that collaboration.

We talked about those collaboration challenges also that you have internally and within those teams, and whether they're co-located, whether they might be across the globe. You also have that culture aspect, obviously, as well. Maybe some language challenges. Also, people are individuals. You are a human being. You will work differently. You want to use different toolsets, et cetera.

Do you want to elaborate?

James Percival

Absolutely. I think aligning people to a single working method from a cross-team collaboration and a cross-geographical perspective is a challenge in itself, and it's not a new one. But I think we're yet to find a really efficient way of sorting it out.

Allowing people to work in their tool of choice, be it Jira, be it Nexus, be it ALM, we can try and minimize the level of work duplication, human error, and in effect, making sure that we can change the way in which we deliver, speed it up, make it more consistent, make it more repeatable. It helps build that relationship with not only the customers in the business, but our customers in the real world using our payments on a daily basis.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

On the work duplication, this is something that we see as a challenge amongst our customers, obviously, because we're doing our very best to ensure that our customers don't see that manual effort. As well as they can, they can just concentrate on their exact job and on their role rather than doing all of this admin work.

You did mention what I really personally liked about this was not just the amount of work and the amount of hours, and you can then convert that into dollars, but the customer and the employee experience.

We talk about this customer experience a lot, and yes, you should be customer-oriented, but unless your employees are happy, it's very difficult to serve happy customers. I think that was great to hear how you said... Maybe you want to tell a story about your happier employees. I just really enjoyed it.

James Percival

I think it's a daily thing, isn't it?

You look at people trying to learn new systems, new ways of working. It is an increased training cost in itself, but it's frustrating. You find that the capacity and their ability might dip slightly as we're trying to learn a new working method.

But really, people are there to do what they want to do: to build, to work with our customers. By being able to let them use their tool of choice and integrate it with the rest of our platform and the rest of our systems, as I said, it minimizes the admin. And I hate admin. I don't know if anyone else does, but...

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Thank you.

Let's go on to the next one, the reflection. We'll take a look at what we have learned. How do we align with the goals? Sorry, I'm just clicking on this clicker and don't really know which way to point it.

Let's look at what was achieved. I do hope that, especially on this slide, people will take away some things and go back to your day job and think, "How could I improve? How could I do things differently?" Also, if you have any comments or any questions, then please do tell us and say, "Actually, I think you could have done this a bit better or a bit differently."

Shall we start with the customer experience one?

James Percival

Sure.

I think it's important to say that here we are still working on this. This is an ongoing journey for us, and we're looking to build and build and build over the next two or three years.

Over the last 18 months, we've been able to put a platform live. We've been able to change our merchants' view into their daily transactions. We provide them with real-time dashboards that can look at their every trade, every transaction, and allow them to make data-driven decisions that you wouldn't normally associate with a payments processor or a merchant acquirer.

We've been able to do this through incessantly reducing our feedback loops in this waterfall environment that we work in, from months and months of development and test to weeks. It really has been refined in our working practices.

As a result, we've got an enormous cost saving in terms of resourcing. We've reduced the error, and we've been able to maintain that our build is stable. Reduction of Sev 1 incidents, for example, via an APS platform, which in turn we've been able to link directly in with our development and testing tools, so that if an APS incident is raised, we can track it from beginning to end and make sure it's fixed.

It's provided us with stability. We've been able to build our capacity to view our future working practices in a more agile and a more flexible and more resilient environment. I think only going forward, we're going to try and continue to integrate this and try and build on these principles to be a bit more of a flexible working team.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

I guess it's fair to say that obviously this project is continuing, and you're currently getting that feedback from your customers. I think the feedback that you've had so far has been really positive.

You don't necessarily have the numbers currently, as in satisfaction surveys and so forth. Even if you don't have those numbers yet, it's great to hear those positive comments from both employees and customers.

Then I guess you're looking to the future, where you want to head next. A good project is never ready, I think. It's all about improving a little bit at a time.

Let's take a look at where you want to head next.

James Percival

We've touched on these points already. The feedback loop's been reduced. We've got less manual work. But this initial project has been so successful from our point of view that we're looking to roll it out to not only the new acquiring platform project that we work on, but we've got other areas working on customer dashboards, on payment gateways, on new innovation projects that we're looking to work with.

I think the integration aspect of everything that we've done has helped to not only reduce the amount of time that we work, but help these ideas to flourish and look to turn them around quicker and provide working proof of concepts and provide the impetus for people to really pick up their work and essentially give us ideas that we didn't have before.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Perfect. Just one more question, really.

You're coming from a testing background and working really predominantly in the testing area, but the project obviously has touched a lot of different business processes and a lot of different teams.

Especially when you look at the cross-team collaboration and looking to the future, which are those teams that you really want to look at next or that you are working with at the moment?

James Percival

Our business processes go end-to-end, from boarding a merchant all the way down to reconciling their transaction and back again.

We started off taking a couple of components of our system, looking to build them and get dev and testing quality assurance a lot closer together, which from the background we came to was a radical idea, actually. In reality, it shouldn't have been.

But this has proven so successful from a speed-to-market point of view for us that we're looking to roll out to, as I said earlier, payment gateway projects, dashboard management, and essentially downstream to rebuild some of the things that we started five years ago.

Dr. Tuuli Bell

Perfect. I think that's it.

We do have a couple of minutes for questions. Before that, I do want to thank Intellica, who kindly stepped down as a third presenter, but I did want to acknowledge the names here. Neil's over there as well.

I think on the very last slide is just a question slide. As I said, can we have the next slide, please? I'll be downstairs at our booth, at the Tasktop booth, and I think you're on the app as well. I'm sure people can find you on LinkedIn and elsewhere if they have questions.

James Percival

I'll be strolling.

Q&A

Q: Any questions? All clear? Yep.

Q: What's the most challenging tool to integrate in your side?

A: I know that Neil, who's worked directly with our tools, could probably give you more of an answer, but I think the most...

A: I'd like to say it's not the tool that's the challenge, it's the process that's the challenge. It's the people and the processes. The tool is the easy bit. It's the people and the processes that are the hard bit.

It's the background to getting the people to... Everybody does it on a change, so it's change and it's people like that. A change agent who's going to change.

A: It's changing the working mentality, I think, and I think everyone can point to instances where that's been the case. Inevitably, as with our waterfall project, we've got a waterfall lifestyle and a waterfall mentality that we need to work to change as well.

A: It's shifting ownership as well, especially with process owners, because process owners, as you all probably appreciate, are very proud with their process, and they believe it's the best and it's the greatest.

The one good thing is we haven't had to actually do a lot of process change at the moment. That's our next step, to try and really integrate the processes. At the moment, we've kept the processes very separate, but integrating so that we're not duplicating data.

As James did mention, I think there's something we've done now, somewhere around 70,000 integrations going off every day. We've reduced licenses across the different tools. ServiceNow licenses have gone down, Pure licenses have gone down, ALM licenses go down. There's no sharing. People haven't got to log on to these tools.

We're actually taking this out into the business as well. Now our next step is actually going into the Salesforce part of Worldpay, which actually is people out there in the real world raising issues, which go into ServiceNow and then go into Pure, which go into ALM, and that's going to be the full integration across there.

So not just with our stuff, plus all the other product improvement stuff that's going on in terms of speed of testing, again, on top of DevOps with automation and stuff like that, trying to get test automation down, development, stuff like that.

Q: Thanks. Any other questions? No other questions?

A: Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you being here today and hope you enjoy the rest of the two days.

Thank you.