For one of the payments industry’s leading platform providers, every signed merchant relationship had to be certified before it could start generating revenue. Each new merchant, card configuration and network flow must be tested, approved and cleared for live transactions. In a market where speed to onboard merchants and payments networks can decide competitive advantage, certification was no longer a back-office activity. It had become a revenue gate… !
The platform provider had built its certification process around a Stratus-based issuer simulator that had served the business for years. But the world around it had changed. Merchant demand was rising, card networks were expanding and payment behaviors were becoming more varied. The simulator, tied to fixed hardware capacity and limited network interfaces, could not keep pace. When demand surged, teams could not simply add capacity or run more tests in parallel. They had to wait and this extended the distance between merchant acquisition and revenue activation.
The slowdown was felt across the board. Merchant onboarding teams were managing queues they could not control. Operations teams lacked the visibility to pinpoint why a test transaction failed. Product and network teams depended on specialist engineers for routine rule changes. Risk and compliance teams needed every certification run to stand up to the scrutiny of regulated card payments, from secure key handling to EMV validation. At the same time, the platform had to support Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, JCB and UnionPay, each with its own rules, response behaviors and certification expectations. Instead of being a commercial strength, the payment provider’s broad network support was an operational constraint.
Building Certification Engine for Growth
Persistent partnered with the client to reimagine the simulator as a growth enabler, not a technical utility. The goal was to help certify more merchants faster, without compromising the transaction integrity, security and assurance expected in a regulated payments environment. We leveraged Google Cloud for its secure, scalable foundation to move beyond fixed infrastructure, while we brought the payments domain depth to translate complex certification requirements into a resilient operating model.
Together, we replaced the hardware-bound simulator with a cloud-backed simulation platform built for scale, control and speed. The modernized platform supported secure transactions, expanded across geographies, managed costs more effectively and kept pace with evolving compliance expectations. For the client, this was not simply a migration to cloud, but a way to remove the infrastructure friction that was slowing merchant readiness.
The new platform segregated the certification journey into modular capabilities for payment message processing, issuer simulation, network listening, queuing, traceability and reporting. This gave the client a more controlled way to handle complex payment flows without the fragility of a monolithic environment. This brought greater consistency in parsing, validating and routing payment messages. Scheme-specific rules could be applied more reliably. Capacity could scale when demand increased. Deployments became repeatable through Infrastructure as Code and hybrid connectivity allowed the cloud-based services to work with the client’s broader payments ecosystem.
Just as importantly, trust was built into the platform from the start. Persistent integrated Thales Hardware Security Modules to support PIN translation, dynamic key exchange and secure management of critical keys. EMV capabilities enabled ARQC validation and ARPC generation across supported card verification numbers. This ensured the client was not only running more tests; it was certifying payment flows with the level of assurance required before those flows could safely move into production.
Persistent also changed the day-to-day experience for internal teams. A configurable rule engine, managed through the UI and backend configuration, allowed only authorized business and operations users to trigger simulator responses based on transaction type, issuer network, card network and business rules. Instead of waiting on developer-led changes for every routine scenario, teams could manage defined certification paths directly. Logging, tracing, audit trails and replay capabilities gave users the visibility to understand where a transaction failed, reproduce the issue and move certification forward with fewer hand-offs.
From Certification Bottleneck to Revenue Acceleration
Merchant certification shifted from a capacity-constrained queue to a more scalable, predictable business process. The client could onboard merchants faster, reduce average certification cycle time and create a clearer path from signed merchant relationships to live transaction revenue..
The cloud-based simulator now supports testing across 17 issuer networks and handles a minimum of 700 transactions per second for high-volume networks such as Visa and Mastercard, up from 300 transactions per second earlier. It also supports at least 50 concurrent connections per card type, allowing more merchants and configurations to be tested in parallel.
Operations teams gained the traceability and replay capabilities needed to diagnose failed scenarios faster and reduce certification rework. Product and network teams could respond more quickly to scheme changes because rules and responses were no longer locked behind slow, developer-heavy change cycles. Risk and compliance stakeholders gained stronger assurance through secure key handling, EMV validation and auditability across the testing lifecycle. By retiring the Stratus environment, the client has not only gained efficiency and scale but has will also save more than a $1.2 million over three years in license cost and avoided hardware maintenance.
For the client, the Persistent and Google Cloud partnership transformed certification from a legacy constraint into a platform for growth. Persistent brought the domain expertise to modernize a mission-critical payments process without weakening control. Google Cloud provided the foundation to scale securely and efficiently. Together, we helped the client preserve the network breadth that mattered to its merchant ecosystem, accelerate merchant-readiness and build a stronger base for sustained revenue growth.
