When a global networking and infrastructure enterprise scaled its digital payment-assisted customer interactions, an older routing model quietly became a tax on growth. Calls that had nothing to do with payments were still being sent through payment platforms, driving up telephony charges, increasing API consumption and adding latency at the exact moments customers expected speed.
Growth Exposed Expensive, PCI-Constrained Call-Flow Design
Over time, the routing framework had accumulated exceptions, workarounds and legacy dependencies. As volumes increased, those decisions translated into real business impact: non-payment calls were being pushed through payment systems, inflating PCI-scoped traffic and increasing the cost to serve.
The ripple effects were visible across operations and customer experience. Telephony costs climbed, API usage grew alongside it, compounding run-rate spend. And because every extra hop added delay, responsiveness suffered, most noticeably during peak periods, when service performance matters most.
Yet the client’s options were constrained. Any change touching payment pathways had to remain PCI-DSS compliant and introducing new tooling or operational steps risked adding even more complexity. The ask was to remove waste from the system, not create a bigger system to manage it.
Compliant-by-Design Architecture Lowers Cost to Serve
Persistent started by aligning stakeholders on what “good” looked like: lower cost to serve, faster response times and no compromise on PCI-DSS. We then mapped the end-to-end customer call journey and the traffic topology across IVR, payment platform touchpoints, downstream systems and reporting to see where cost, latency and compliance exposure were actually introduced.
With the current state baselined, we executed a traffic-routing optimization assessment that included call-flow instrumentation, identification of duplicate handoffs, analysis of API call patterns and a PCI scoping review to isolate which interactions genuinely required payment-platform involvement. Based on these findings, we redesigned the routing decision logic so non-payment calls could bypass the payment platform entirely, while payment-intent calls were routed through hardened, PCI-compliant pathways.
To make the new design durable (not just a one-time fix), Persistent engineered the operating backbone: we improved responsiveness with real-time signaling and streamlined handshakes to reduce unnecessary call time, rationalized telephony and API dependencies to eliminate redundant invocations and introduced automation-led onboarding so new workflows, regions or customer segments could be added through configuration rather than rework.
We also enabled unified visibility across the ecosystem with dashboards and alerts for traffic distribution, failure patterns and compliance-relevant events, backed by runbooks and governance controls to sustain PCI-DSS alignment through future changes. Finally, we validated the solution with end-to-end testing (functional, performance and compliance) and executed a phased rollout to reduce risk while capturing savings early.
70% Lower Telephony Cost, 100% PCI-DSS Compliance & Faster Time-to-Onboard
With unnecessary call paths removed and PCI boundaries clarified, the client saw a rapid impact across cost, compliance and agility in pilot:
- Telephony handling costs dropped by 70% by removing redundant routing and improving signaling efficiency
- 100% PCI-DSS compliance with stronger governance over where sensitive payment data could (and could not) flow, proving cost takeout and regulatory rigor can reinforce each other
- Automation-enabled workflows drove faster customer onboarding, allowing the business to introduce new services and routing logic quickly, without increasing architectural complexity
Why Persistent
For large-scale digital enterprises, routing is a business lever: it shapes cost to serve, compliance exposure and the experience customers remember. Small architectural decisions can quietly create structural waste or unlock durable efficiency.
Persistent helped the client reimagine traffic flows by separating non-payment interactions from payment-critical systems, thereby simplifying operations while protecting PCI integrity. This is the moat we bring as a transformation partner: we combine architectural rigor with domain and compliance awareness, abstract complexity from the operating model and deliver outcomes that show up in the P&L. We deliver a streamlined, scalable environment that reduced opex, safeguarded sensitive data and kept the business ready for continued growth.
