DBA - SDS Case Study

Summary

We partnered with Secure Bancard (SBC) to unlock a key growth opportunity by adding multi-bin support to their powerful and complex payments application: Pioneer. This project involved a significant architectural evolution, achieved through close collaboration and delivered seamlessly to users—deploying a strategic capability that directly supported active sales efforts and set the stage for scalable merchant onboarding.

Who is Secure Bancard?

Secure Bancard (SBC) is a payments company with a reputation for stability, innovation, and strong client relationships. With a mature platform and deep domain expertise, SBC has continually invested in its flagship Pioneer application to meet the evolving needs of financial institutions and payment processors. This continued focus on enhancing the platform reflects a commitment to serving customers who demand advanced features like Level 2 and Level 3 transaction support and robust reporting tools.

The Challenge

SBC’s Pioneer application was originally designed around a single acquiring BIN (Bank Identification Number) model. As their business grew and evolved, this architecture became a blocker to onboarding institutional clients that required clean data separation and visibility by program or acquiring BIN.

The single BIN architecture meant that sales conversations with high-value targets often required custom workarounds that weren’t scalable. To grow their business and stay competitive, SBC needed a structural evolution of their platform to support multiple BINs.

What’s an Acquiring BIN, and Why Does It Matter?

A BIN is a group of merchants that is affiliated with a single sponsor bank, and the BIN allows for tracking and reconciliation of transactions related to those merchants. In the payments world, supporting multiple BINs enables:

A consistent user interface and operational processes across multiple payment processors.
Segregated transaction data for different client programs.
Application of program-specific rules and controls.
Access to Level 2 & 3 data for better reporting and lower interchange fees, key differentiators in the B2B payments space.

For SBC, enabling multiple BINs wasn’t a feature request. It was core to their vision.

The Solution

A Custom Fit

There wasn’t a plug-and-play solution to the challenge. SBC set out to implement a system that could flexibly support both aggregated and siloed data views, depending on the operational context. Due to the complexity of the Pioneer application, anything less than a surgical integration would have compromised the platform’s stability and performance.

Deep Integration

DBA partnered closely with SBC through every step of the process. Together, we:

Mapped out where aggregation across BINs was appropriate—and where it wasn't.
Rewrote the routing layer in Elixir to handle increased load and complexity.
Built a smart proxy capable of returning either aggregated or isolated data views.
Optimized SQL performance to maintain fast response times even with higher data volume.
Worked through UI edge cases where data scope wasn't immediately clear.

This was a deeply iterative effort involving joint discovery, thorough QA, and direct collaboration with SBC’s internal team. We worked side-by-side to ensure the final system aligned with how SBC wanted to serve its clients.

The Results

Business Impact

Mult-bin support is live and actively supporting new client growth.

SBC is rapidly onboarding new merchants, leveraging the new capabilities.
This evolution expanded SBC's reach, enabling them to serve a broader range of client segments with confidence and precision.
SBC is now able to move forward with new deals and clients of larger scale with more efficiency, all without requiring individual customizations inside of the Pioneer platform.

Technical Wins

Zero downtime deployment to production.
Routing and data aggregation logic scales with increasing volume.
Legacy components were retained where appropriate—balancing cost with performance.
Migrated the application suite to dedicated hardware with a trusted hosting provider.
Scaled batched processing system to support growth of the Pioneer platform.
Architected and launched in 10 months.

Why It Worked

Driven by the clear vision of Secure Bancard’s leadership, this project succeeded because of close partnership and relentless iteration. DBA identified early on that a big rewrite wasn’t necessary. The proven Pioneer system could be scaled with the right expertise. The result was a launch with no drama and no regression—just a smarter, more capable system that enables new lines of revenue.

Scaling a legacy platform doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. If your business is ready to expand without sacrificing reliability, DBA can help you build what’s next: carefully, collaboratively, and without cutting corners.