Case Study - Ewallet System
For Delivery Hero

Building a Multi-National Ewallet System for Delivery Hero

The company has introduced a variety of payment systems to meet customer preferences and regulatory environments of different nations. The focus: Online payment, which is easier to process for the company and more flexible for the customer.

Confronted with a multitude of differing markets, currencies and payment technologies, Delivery Hero decided to put this system on a consolidated foundation – and add ewallet functionalities along the way.

This marked the beginning of the complex ewallet and payment project, in which our solution CoreWallet has acted as the big enabler.

The Vision: An International, Ewallet-Based Payment System

Delivery Hero has established online payment as one of the core ways of payment for their services. Having relied on a variety of self-contained payment systems for various regions in the past, they wanted to innovate their approach to the benefit of their customers.

So, Delivery Hero decided to bring their various systems together in one unified system featuring payment and ewallet functionalities. By this, they tried to achieve three major goals.

1. Improving Refunds

One of the biggest drawbacks of Delivery Hero’s various payment systems has been their sometimes lethargic handling of refunds.

The whole process was reliant on the cooperation of the customer’s bank and the restaurant’s bank in question. Therefore, a simple refund requested by the customer could take weeks, until the transaction had successfully passed through all required stages. And all that just because the garlic knots were missing in the order.

Within an ewallet-based system, the refund can be easily granted to a user by the restaurant, without any banks being involved directly. Instead, refund requests are processed within a closed-loop system. Upon request, the money is charged back immediately, in the form of digital vouchers or value tokens. They can be spent for other purchases on the Delivery Hero platform.

Thus, the customer can claim their money back without much ado. This adds to a better user experience and makes online payment a more attractive option.

2. Offering Incentives

A consolidated, ewallet-based payment system is able to allow users to build up a balance of value tokens to spend on various offers or services.

For example, it would be possible to start incentive programs. Delivery Hero is able to let customers collect digital loyalty points and spend them in the restaurants listed on the platform. This is an option within the ability of a wallet-based system, if restaurants or companies decide to embark on that road.

3. Higher Flexibility and Scalability

Putting fragmented payment systems on a consolidated basis also creates a platform that can easier be maintained and expanded.

When Delivery Hero wanted to add new features to their portfolios, they had to go over each of their payment systems separately – often with high effort to ensure compatibility.

Therefore, one goal of the project was to put the different, regional payment systems on a shared foundation, so that migrating new features from one market to another would proceed much quicker. Customers should not be forced to sit tight for way too long, while their global neighbours are already enjoying new functionalities.

The Preparation: Taking in Ewallet and Tech Expertise

Through their years in the platform economy business, Delivery Hero has built up expertise in payment. However, they were looking for a third-party company to complement them in the ewallet technology domain.

What’s more, they wanted their contractor-to-be to not only consult them, but also take over architectural responsibilities and bring their own coders to work on the development of the application.

An appeal that ticked all our boxes.

1. trimplement: Coming in as a Partner

Having been recommended to Delivery Hero by several former customers of ours, we went through a precise due diligence phase. The same was done for our software foundation CoreWallet, which was examined in a technical audit, closely collating its features with the requirements at hand.

In the end, Delivery Hero settled for us and we have been on the project since the very beginning. Together, Delivery Hero and trimplement assessed the pain points in Delivery Hero’s existing system and mapped out the actual business flows in all their complexity.

But our cooperation did not stop there. Our Solution Architect consulted the Delivery Hero company over the whole course of the project and was fully in charge of the system’s architecture. He acted as the intermediary of the Delivery Hero product owners and the software development team, making sure the new product met the goals of Delivery Hero’s platform economy business, while also fitting seamlessly into the system landscape.

At the same time, our software development team took care of the technical side of the migration, setting up CoreWallet for the challenges ahead and supporting the Delivery Hero developers.

2. Sharing Knowledge, Enabling Change

As fintech enablers, it’s part of our company philosophy to not just provide a turn-key solution and then be out the door. We make sure to enable our customers to keep the system running and expand on it, even without our direct help.

To this regard, we performed in-depth knowledge transfer sessions for the Delivery Hero team over the whole length of the project. Those sessions brought the two company’s diverse software engineering teams on the same page and promoted a shared mindset of robust, secure development – essential when creating any kind of financial software.

The Solution: Laying out the Foundations with CoreWallet

In the Delivery Hero project, the knowledge stream did not point in a single direction, of course. We shared our knowledge of ewallet technology and processing with Delivery Hero, but we also learned a lot about the specific business models and challenges of the food delivery industry.

This also helped us to realign and expand our ewallet software foundation CoreWallet to function in accordance with the project requirements.

CoreWallet has its roots in general ecommerce platforms like online shops and etailers. The payment processes for such services get away with being a lot slower than those for meal ordering. If the pair of shoes you bought will be delivered in three days, the bank or PSP transferring your funds may take its time. But the Vietnamese takeaway restaurant wants to see the payment confirmed right away – who wants to wait three days for their Phở?

Having said this, such specific requirements really play to the strengths of CoreWallet. As a software foundation it is designed to be flexible and open-ended, allowing it to be easily adjusted to the product-to-be.

A Two-Part Process: Migrating the Payment Systems

Accelerating payment was not the only challenge at hand, though. The center of Delivery Hero’s assignment has been the integration of ewallet functionalities. This required us to migrate already established customer accounts and credit cards from different regional payment platforms into a consolidated, new system.

To go about this most effectively, we settled for a two-stage development process:

1. Payment Unification

First, we decided to merge the separate Delivery Hero payment systems used in different nations and regions into one consolidated solution based on CoreWallet.

This first task was a prerequisite for the second one and had to be at least partially completed before we could go to work on the second one. The reason is simple: A key part of utilizing an online wallet for payment is to offer a payment mix. This means enabling users to pay with their value token balance and online payment at the same time.

If we had kept Delivery Hero’s former system, we would have to build payment mix support for every part of that system separately. This would have contradicted the idea of a global service. CoreWallet is well equipped to handle this large, multi-flavoured payment mix.

The idea was to launch this new payment processing system in different multinational markets via phased roll-out – successively adding new systems to the mix.

2. Ewallet Integration

Once the first task was completed for a single regional payment system, we could incorporate the ewallet functions into the new CoreWallet-driven payment system.

We decided to place a transition layer between the platform and the new APIs, allowing for fast interaction at an appropriate effort.

Conclusion: A New Service in Short Time

Just five months after development started, the joint software development teams presented not just an MVP, but a fully mature wallet product. Delivery Hero was able to replace their existing payment system on the first regional market, while fully keeping the traffic.

From there onwards, the migration efforts continued. At the time of writing this, the new system has been launched in eight countries. Millions of orders have been paid using the new global ewallet-enabled payment platform.

At every step of the way, we supported Delivery Hero with the full package of development services, technical consulting, deployment and maintenance. Our emoney management suite CoreWallet proved to be just the right foundation to base Delivery Hero’s new product on, as it comes with secure, scalable and flexible payment mix support and ewallet features.

And what’s more we also greatly enjoyed working with the multinational, diverse and highly capable Delivery Hero team. The whole project was characterized by excellent teamwork. That leaves us all the more proud that we had the opportunity to help Delivery Hero turning their global ewallet into a success story.

Enjoy that meal! And pay for it in style!