Who and what is PayNet?
Greetings,
We are delighted to introduce you to our all-new PayNet Engineering blog. One of the main objectives of the blog is to highlight the engineering intricacies at work in PayNet.
We would like to share our experience and technical insights on how we design, build, operate and scale our infrastructure, products and services. Our aim is not only to showcase our success stories but also the challenges, pain points and lessons learned over the years with our infrastructure, technology stack, products and people.
With the world of technology evolving faster than ever, our approach might not be a one-size-fits-all for the different real-world scenarios and use cases, but we’ll elucidate the rationale behind our decision making and how it shaped our best practices. In short, we believe this would be a great spot to comprehend what we do best and gain familiarity with our tech culture whilst educating yourselves with our discoveries (sometimes painful).
First and foremost, we would like to kick-off by providing a sense of perspective to our audience by shedding some light on PayNet as an organization and some of our services to the nation.
Over the past several years, PayNet has been gaining popularity and recognition as the premier national payments network and shared central infrastructure for Malaysia’s financial markets. As the sole provider of financial market utilities, PayNet aims to build an inclusive, accessible, and efficient payments and financial eco-systems for Malaysia.
PayNet’s objective is to provide the nation with an economical, agile platform, to respond swiftly to new requirements and innovations, ensuring demands can be met in a timely and efficient manner and ensure Malaysia’s e-Payment’s ecosystems remain proficient, pertinent, and competitive.
As of the end of 2022, PayNet processes more than MYR $1 trillion annually and this continues to trend northwards. Nevertheless, one of the lesser-known facts is that technology has always been at our forefront, with a burgeoning in-house team that comprise of DevOps, solution architects, software developers, network engineering, infrastructure platform, cyber security etc that design, build, manage, operate and optimize systems from the ground up, ensuring that digital payments remain uninterrupted and becomes second nature as part of our daily lives.
Some of our better-known services are:
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– Eh, I still don’t know what Payments Network Malaysia does?! 😊
Fret not — a payments switch is a somewhat specialized entity and not as familiar sounding as a bank. Investopedia defines a payments switch as:
· A country’s payment systems are the financial technology infrastructure that allows commercial and financial transactions to operate efficiently and unimpeded.
· These payment systems also connect a country’s financial activity to the global economy.
· Because of their critical nature, these payment systems are maintained by a country’s central bank and overseen by government regulators.
In a nutshell, think of PayNet as an Ethernet switch you might have lying around in your home — imagine that each wired Ethernet port connects separately to a bank, e-Wallet provider or third-party acquirer (henceforth, termed participants) in the Malaysian ecosystem to facilitate payments transactions.
By providing this cost-efficient and shared network connectivity (the Ethernet switch..), any participant only requires a connection to the PayNet backbone, which can then facilitate communication with the other 5, 10, 20, 30 participants in Malaysia.
In simple math, there is no need for a n-1 relationship model with the ensuing operational, engineering and cost implications. That underlying infrastructure complexity is owned by PayNet. Thus, the emphasis on Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd.
Layered on top of this strong networking foundation, are the various PayNet services, which we provide to the ecosystem participants.
This being our inaugural engineering blog post, we have tried to set the context by succinctly explaining what we do.
Next up are some of the key goals we keep in mind and which help guide our engineering rationale.
