PayMongo strengthens payment reliability

MANILA, Philippines — PayMongo continues to strengthen payment reliability to help businesses avoid lost sales and transaction disruptions, resolving 75 percent of system incidents before they affect merchants.

The company also reported cutting its average service restoration time from hours to minutes after consolidating its monitoring and security tools through technology provider Datadog.

In an interview with The STAR, PayMongo chief product and technology officer Jose Dalino Jr. said delays in processing payments can drive customers to abandon purchases or switch to another merchant.

Failed transactions can also create uncertainty over whether a payment went through, requiring businesses and payment providers to coordinate on refunds, disputes or another attempt to complete the purchase.

“Uptime and transaction reliability are absolutely mission-critical for us,” Dalino said. “Every second of downtime means real money lost for the thousands of businesses that rely on us to collect payments from their customers.”

Dalino explained that a digital payment passes through several systems, beginning with a merchant’s website or mobile application before reaching the payment gateway and the bank or electronic wallet involved.

These steps include verifying the transaction and checking whether sufficient funds are available. A bottleneck along the way can delay or interrupt the payment.

PayMongo brought its monitoring tools together to allow engineers to trace transactions across these systems and identify where problems occur.

Dalino said the company extended this monitoring to more than 60 software services that handle different parts of its operations. This allows engineers to spot rising errors and address capacity constraints before they develop into disruptions visible to customers.

According to the company, its systems can also detect when a payment partner becomes unavailable, notify merchants and automatically suspend the affected payment method.

PayMongo has also introduced safeguards allowing unsuccessful transactions to be retried without charging customers twice, Dalino said.

The improvements address a business concern for the payments provider itself. Dalino said reliability problems had previously prompted some merchants to move to competing platforms.

Alongside operational monitoring, PayMongo uses tools to identify unusual transaction patterns and scan application code for security weaknesses. Dalino said merchant and customer education remains part of its efforts to protect account credentials.

“Reliability is what earns trust in payments,” he said.