Augment their in-house product team to build new features and improve existing solutions to help with the company’s scaling efforts across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Provided four squads that worked in six key areas: M-pesa and EBANX integrations, refund to source capability, partners portal development, supply pricing automation, and dispatcher & ETA optimization.
Every solution Tintash built helped solve a critical problem for Swvl. Supply pricing automation, for instance, helped save thousands of man hours while achieving a 98% accuracy of results.
Meet the startups changing mobility for emerging middle classes - TechCrunch
Swvl, first $1.5bln unicorn from the Middle East to list on Nasdaq - Zawya
Swvl , the renowned global provider of transformative tech-enabled mass transit solutions and ridesharing services, wanted to partner with software development companies to further improve their technology offerings. The first Middle Eastern unicorn to be listed on Nasdaq, the Dubai-based Egyptian startup was on an ambitious growth trajectory with expansion plans for the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Swvl was looking to onboard technology solution providers that could augment their in-house product development team. The collaboration would speed up the implementation of new features and help address their emerging market needs in a timely manner.
The selection criteria was pretty clear. The shortlisted candidates had to be stellar engineers, teams with excellent communication and problem-solving skills to achieve synergy with the company’s existing product efforts. Following a series of written tests and elaborate interviews, Tintash was selected as Swvl’s technology partner.
Based on our Team Augmentation model, Tintash provided four separate engineering squads that worked on different problem sets for the client. Each squad specialized in specific skills and worked under an Engineering Manager (EM) from Tintash, who in turn reported to a Senior Engineering Manager (SEM) from Swvl.
Throughout the course of this project, the squads would schedule syncups to report on daily progress. Any necessary feedback was communicated either through internal communication channels or via Camaradly (a P2P employee engagement platform developed by Tintash).
All in all, our squads worked on implementing the following feature sets:
Swvl wanted to transition the bookings process from cash payments to cashless transactions in the Kenyan region. For this, they were looking to integrate M-pesa, Kenya’s leading mobile phone-based money transfer and payments service, as a direct payment option in their app’s existing booking workflows.
There were numerous challenges involved in implementing this feature. Since cash payments represented a dominant share of the region’s overall revenue, a seamless transition was essential to keeping the impact on revenue minimal. An alternative had to be offered to retain customers during the transition. The whole process had to be engineered in as little time as possible while also ensuring compliance with the local regulatory requirements.
Our team worked on a solution that required minimal changes to roll out the M-pesa payment option. We reduced the unnecessary steps introduced by the discontinuation of cash payments. These steps involved requiring Kenyan users to make payments through their Swvl wallets, which had to be topped up using M-pesa – the local mobile wallet – making the process unnecessarily longer and complicated.
The payment gateway that was being used only supported the M-pesa payment option asynchronously via callbacks. To fit it inside the synchronous process of booking rides, the team implemented a polling mechanism on the backend to identify when a callback from the payment gateway had been received. This helped in establishing synchronously whether a transaction was successful or not.
We managed to implement this solution within the tight deadlines and achieved all our targets. The team ensured a seamless transition with minimal changes to the existing system. There were no contractual updates required with the payment gateways and we were able to plug it into the synchronous implementation. The adoption rate of M-pesa showed a sharp rise upon its initial release in the last week of February, 2022 and was evidence of this frictionless introduction of the new payment system.
The existing version of Swvl application had only one payment gateway that was integrated natively into the customer app. The client wanted to integrate multiple payment options as a scalable solution for launching the app in multiple countries across different continents. Having those local payment options was essential since local transaction fees were lower compared to global payment gateways.
This was a challenging undertaking since the existing integrations were baked into the application from both the client and backend perspective. The team was required to first decouple the system from existing payment gateways and options and then integrate the new payment option that was more data and configuration-driven.
We started by decoupling the existing system in iOS and Android customer apps and on backend APIs. We followed that up by designing a new payments module where all the configuration for payment gateways and options could be stored in the database and was configurable at the city level. The new data-driven approach would make it easier to decide which gateways and options were applicable in each case i.e. showing users payment options that were specific to their geographic locations.
Once the new design was finalized, we implemented it in the application. We also integrated a new payment gateway, EBANX, to help prepare for the platform’s launch in Brazil. While designing the new system, our team went the extra mile and created room for future integrations of additional payment gateways and options with minimal changes required.
We also made changes to the Travel website to integrate that gateway natively via Card Tokenization. The existing gateway was integrated via web page redirects which prevented a smooth user experience by having users enter their card details every time they wanted to book a ride through the website.
Our team completed work on the new design as well as the payment gateway integration on all backend platforms. At the time of this writing, the feature’s release was pending. Once launched, it would have unlocked new opportunities for Swvl by enabling faster integrations of additional payment gateways and options as well