Touch 'n Go eWallet is a leading e-wallet provider in Malaysia, product of the joint venture between Touch ‘n Go Sdn Bhd and Ant Financial Group. Together, they have embarked on a journey to support a reliable mobile wallet for Malaysians, leading Malaysia's transformation towards a cashless society. Touch 'n Go eWallet was able to harness cloud computing and the latest cloud technologies to enable Malaysians with the power of mobile payments. Millions of people use TNG eWallet as their go-to payment method for transport fares, utility bills, in-store purchases, and online shopping every day. Meanwhile, TNG eWallet has been promoting financial inclusion. TNG eWallet launched innovative products (such as GO+ and GOpinjam) to make financial services easily accessible to users and small businesses struggling with cash flow during the pandemic.

IT Architecture Challenge
Touch 'n Go eWallet had obtained the Central Bank of Malaysia (BNM)’s approval to operate and provide mobile e-wallet services. The new mobile e-wallet enables Malaysians to experience a secure, convenient and seamless payment ecosystem to perform online shopping, bill payment, retail payment via Quick Response (QR) codes, as well as Peer-to-Peer fund transfers.

In particular, the previous disaster recovery (DR) system is complex and cannot support the rapid growth of business. The original RDS default backup system has a 24-hour RPO, which is unable to meet business requirements, forcing Touch 'n Go eWallet to revamp its IT architecture. From the standpoint of problem and solution, the technology solution had to operate and deliver across 4 key areas:

1. Regulatory Frameworks
2. Security
3. User and Partner Expectations
4. Agility & Scalability

Across various domains of User Identity management, Payment System, Data Capabilities, Monitoring, Development and Deployment capability across mobile, hardware, web lies a variety of challenges in the modern technology paradigm.

Quality Management Challenge
Any quality issues for a financial mobile platform with such popularity can severely impact consumer experience. In addition, the company has entered a stage of rapid development. In 2022 alone, TNG eWallet launched more than 2,000 new features (such as Money Packet, TNG eWallet Visa Card, and the enhanced TNG NFC card). This poses several challenges to its quality management:

1. Traditional manual testing cannot keep up with the pace of TNG eWallet's iterations. Also, since TNG eWallet is a financial platform, its updates must be tested on all required mobile devices and platforms to ensure stability.
2. The company does not have enough device models to test compatibility and UI adaptation issues but is reluctant to purchase the devices themselves due to the high costs.
3. The pandemic forced employees to work from home. In this case, physical mobile devices could not be shared among employees, which decreased the efficiency of collaborative testing. The traditional testing approach made it difficult to meet testing requirements.

Overall, all these challenges and opportunities had to be served, keeping the stack agile and highly responsive to changes as the consumer and product ecosystem evolves due to both macro and micro factors driving the ecosystem and the economy.

Critical to the partnership was Alibaba Cloud's professional service and support team. Alibaba Cloud's responsive and dedicated support team offered premium support via DingTalk, which allowed Touch 'n Go eWallet to find fast solutions to any problem 24/7. Furthermore, the cutting- edge cloud technology as well as the comprehensive security solution, enabled Touch 'n Go eWallet to comply with the regulatory requirements for faster go to market product deliverables.

Alibaba Cloud was a clear choice of across a variety of evaluation factors that enables a Financial technology to Build, Scale and Leverage its technology stack to create value for the user, partners and the organizations at scale.

1. Capability - The Alibaba Cloud is truly industry agnostic platform that caters to a variety of use cases that Touch 'n Go eWallet has across mobility, payment, operations, customer support, and Big Data.
2. Scalability - The same system that manages the Alibaba Ecosystem across e-commerce, Financial technology, and Digital Banking brings forth with it solutions that fit right into Touch 'n Go eWallet's business goals and objectives.
3. Agility - The cloud works for across a variety of form factors that Touch 'n Go eWallet's users use and enabled us to build a mobile first solution with rapid deployment capabilities with the ability Monitor, Build and Iterate at a scale that meets its user and partner expectations.
4. One-stop app quality management platform - Alibaba Cloud EMAS Mobile Testing allows customers and developers to perform all-around testing in an independent or assisted manner. It helps customers identify issues and hidden risks in apps (such as compatibility issues, functionality issues, UI adaptation issues, and performance issues) to ensure app quality across the board.

Creating an ecosystem for mobile payments requires a secure, reliable, and quick infrastructure. Among the many products the joint venture used is ECS, which allowed reliable and easy scalability. Adding to ECS, TnG Digital also commissioned CDN, as Malaysia already had a datacenter CDN, for rapid transfer of payments with limited latency. Alibaba Cloud's Anti-DDoS also provided the security needed to thwart unwanted attacks.

Touch 'n Go eWallet also leveraged Alibaba Cloud's Database Backup service (DBS) to reduce RPO to mere minutes, which reduced the pressure on DBAs and minimized business risk by simplifying the data restoration process.

Alibaba Cloud PolarDB is also used as part of Touch 'n Go eWallet’s effort to cope with increasing traffic demands and ensure peak performance can be managed in any events.

Meanwhile, to address the pain points and challenges the TNG eWallet Test Team faced in quality management and mobile testing, Alibaba Cloud EMAS Mobile Testing offers:

1. SaaSified One-Stop Test Platform

EMAS Mobile Testing allows TNG eWallet to implement quality assurance on the cloud throughout the whole testing process, including managing apps, recording scripts, performing automated testing, and viewing online test reports. During the pandemic, the TNG eWallet Test Team maintained efficient collaboration and communication through EMAS Mobile Testing. Direct access to physical mobile devices in data centers also addresses the issue that mobile devices cannot be shared remotely.

2. Comprehensive Coverage of Device Models

Mobile devices of more than 300 models that are widely used in the Southeast Asian market are running in the data centers for EMAS Mobile Testing. EMAS covers 2.4 times more models than the previous test service provider that TNG eWallet cooperated with, so it can meet the requirements of TNG eWallet.

3. More Than Ten Times Improvement in Script Recording Efficiency Compared with the Traditional Coding Approach

As TNG eWallet grows at a fast pace, testing requirements are increasing rapidly. TNG eWallet can save the hassle of manually writing test scripts using EMAS Mobile Testing. Testers can perform operations on the apps running on EMAS's mobile devices (such as logging on to apps, browsing through apps, and making payments). The system records the operations and automatically generates test scripts, which can be directly used for compatibility and functional tests. TNG eWallet has produced and managed more than 1,000 test scripts within six months without upsizing the Test Team and has accommodated test requirements for thousands of new features and enhancements.

4. Informative Test Reports

EMAS Mobile Testing provides content-rich online test reports. Report data is summarized and analyzed, and video playback is provided to help identify and locate exceptions (such as crashes and stutters anytime and anywhere). The TNG eWallet Test Team uses online test reports provided by the platform to efficiently collaborate with the Development Team to pinpoint and fix issues.

In summary, using the Alibaba Cloud solution, Touch 'n Go protected its network from malicious attacks and reduced RPO to minutes, minimizing business risk and ensuring peak performance in any event. Also, the EMAS Mobile Testing helped TNG eWallet perform app testing efficiently in a single pane of glass. It addressed the various challenges faced by the Quality Management Team while the company is developing rapidly. Touch 'n Go eWallet achieves six times improvement in test efficiency with Alibaba Cloud EMAS Mobile Testing.

TNG eWallet has become an integral part of Malaysian’s daily life and will continue to grow at an amazing rate in the future to provide more life services to local and foreign customers.

Touch ‘n Go's vision of building a world-class Unified Financial Technology platform for the Malaysian Economy houses in its ability to respond to change and be agile as it scales and diversifies. Coupled with Alibaba Cloud's ever-evolving stack, TnG has the ability to build future looking products using Big Data, Machine Learning, Distributed computing.

Overall, Alibaba Cloud brings new cutting-edge technology, global security standards, and operational effectiveness. The combination allows Touch ‘n Go to focus on building better products and services. Alibaba Cloud's flexibility and scalability will support the company to adapt to new challenges and the demands of the business environment.