Unity Bridge

Unity Bridge

Unnamed Global Payments & Commercial Fleet Solutions Provider

Flowmoco partnered with a Fortune 1000 payments company to address the complexities of fragmented data systems. Overcoming bottlenecks caused by disparate back-end infrastructures, we developed "Unity Bridge" — a unified, low-code API-driven platform. Enabling seamless data consumption across systems, accelerating development, and reducing operational costs.

Flowmoco is a trusted provider to a global Fortune 1000 company. Over the years we've helped them with many challenges, operating transparently as an strategic development partner.

As is usual for a global enterprise, data can often consist of many disparate systems. These systems can become fragmented, and the fragmentation continues through development and acquisition of new business.

Frontends and applications need data from many systems and most of these systems have their own way of doing things — eg. authentication, data structures, differing tech stacks. This results in a high level of complexity at the coalface for delivery teams.

Encountering these problems ourselves while developing an new white-labelled application and tech stack for their B2B payments system (more on that in another article), Flowmoco drove an initiative to solve this data disparity with a proof-of-concept (POC) called Unity Bridge.

The Problem in a nutshell

Our corporate partner was grappling with a fragmented data infrastructure. With a multiplicity of existing systems, and new ones being introduced, it was very challenging for data consumers (applications and front-end UIs) to fetch or manipulate the data they needed from various back-end systems; and the manual process to extract, transform, and consolidate this data significantly slowed development and increased delivery risks.

Obviously the complexity at the operational level for delivery teams was significant. Delivery bottlenecks were frequent. Each new feature or application potentially required developers to understand and integrate with disparate data sources that lacked standardised interfaces. Additionally data from these different systems ran the risk of being isolated silos, creating inefficiencies and limiting the scalability of our partners IT infrastructure.

The bottom line: all of this complexity risked undermining business goals, causing delays in delivering projects and driving up operational costs. It was clear we needed a way to bridge backend systems with a unified interfaces for data consuming applications.

Our Solution

To address these challenges, our POC aimed to create a low-code, API-driven data platform. The solution was built on a core objective: to develop a unified interface that decouples data sources from their respective backends and presents them in a simplified, agnostic format. This API-based platform would act as a middleware, abstracting the complexities of the underlying systems and allowing applications to consume data without needing to interact directly with multiple systems.

The POC introduced a data engine to standardise how our corporate partner's systems are accessed. This engine breaks down data from various backends into common attributes, which are then reassembled into a unified interface. The platform provided the tools to configure data transformations and schema generation automatically, streamlining application development and reducing the need for manual integration. Importantly, our partner could continue using its existing systems without altering them, as the solution simply added a flexible layer on top.

By creating Resolvers —lightweight bindings between data attributes and backend services — the system enabled dynamic query capabilities. For example, an input from one system could automatically trigger a chain of calls across multiple systems, reducing the complexity for front-end applications. Additionally the platform was designed to allow delivery teams to work independently of the core system, significantly simplifying development workflows.

In conclusion, it's been a very successful POC. We've empowered our partner to unify its data management approach, making it easier for teams to access and work with data across disparate systems. This concept solution has laid the groundwork for a scalable, flexible platform that could adapt to new data sources and technologies without sacrificing performance or security. We're very happy to say as a result of Unity Bridge our partner has positioned itself to be more agile, reduce its development time and delivery risks, and enjoy an improvement on overal operational efficiency.