📝 The Journey of Deluxe: From a Trusted Payments Company to a Digital First Platform
Deluxe, a leading provider of payments, data products, and platform services, has been around for over a century. The company has been helping transform businesses for 100 years, and it continues to thrive and survive because of its trustworthiness. In this article, we will take a deep dive into the journey of Deluxe, from a trusted payments company to a digital-first platform. We will explore how Deluxe has transformed itself into a trusted payments and data platform and technology company, and how it has become a leading provider of payments, data products, and platform services.
🤖 The Divisional CTO of Deluxe
The divisional CTO of Deluxe is a technology and an engineer who has been doing this for over 20 years in widely different verticals. In his current role, he leads the transformation of Deluxe into a trusted payments and data platform and technology company. Before he gets into the Deluxe story, he asks the audience how many of them have heard of Deluxe. He then proceeds to tell the story of how Deluxe came into being.
🏦 The Story of Deluxe
Deluxe was founded by Jr Hotchkiss in 1914-1915. He saw that there was a problem people were unable to get paid or pay, and it was really hard. So, he took this problem and invented what was the personal checkbook or personalized checkbook that could be used both by businesses and by individuals. The checkbook really revolutionized payments for about seven decades before other things came into play. The reason for this story is not to tell you guys to go back and write more checks, but to highlight the innovation and the ingenuity that Deluxe has been known for.
💰 Deluxe Today
Today, Deluxe is a leading provider of payments, data products, and platform services. It processes about three trillion dollars in payments on an annual basis, which is probably about five or six percent of the GDP. It serves about 4 million small and medium-sized businesses and partners and serves about 4,000 financial institutions. It was ranked the 11 most trustworthy financial services company in America two years in a row.
🚀 Deluxe's Journey
In 2016-2015, Deluxe was already a trustworthy financial services company, but the leadership at that point of time was like, "Hey, the whole world is going digital. What does that mean for us? How can we become this digital company?" The obvious way that they decided that this would be a good idea to become digital was to go off and do a whole bunch of acquisitions. Deluxe did about 50 acquisitions in four years, doing a poor job of integrating. But that really did not work.
From a technology landscape, what you ended up getting was about 30 different products, 30 different stacks, different languages, frameworks, databases, all kinds of things, different tools. In 2015, the cloud was really taken off, and that's when the leadership was also like, "Hey, how do I make sure I become this cloud-native player here while I'm digital?" So, it was a lot going on at that point in time.
In 2020, there was a change in leadership at Deluxe, and the new leadership team decided to go back and say, "Really, based on our collective experience, what does it really mean to be digital first?" The foundation was also the trust piece of it. So, they came back with about four different points, and matching it back to the trust piece of it, there was much more that they put together, but really these were the four from a trust perspective.
🔒 The Four Trust Points
The first point was that everything when you say digital first, every one of your touchpoints is digital. So, if you're not continuously scanning, testing, validating for security vulnerabilities, you are not going to be able to get that trust. Similarly, speed and agility in the digital paradigm mean that you need that real-time feedback as you're putting that code in. It's not just getting the value and solving the problems from a customer perspective, but it's also making sure that while you're doing that and pushing that out quickly, you're not introducing any vulnerabilities.
Transparency is one of the cornerstones from a trust perspective. We serve FIS financial institutions about 4,000 of them, and that's a highly regulated industry. As a part of our association, we get audited probably about 200 times a year, and we have the ffeic, we have the cfpb, and we have an alphabet soup of auditors who want to come in and see what are we doing. So, for us, it's really important from a customer trust perspective to really come back and reveal what is our posture and really what are our practices.
The last but not least is really proactive anticipation. It's not a matter of if but when the next vulnerability happens. So, when this happens, we are ready. We are ready to mitigate. We are ready to react. We're going back and talking to our customers and saying, "See, we are ready. We have the readiness. We are able to go back and reinforce our reputation, and we are able to go back and react quickly."
🛠️ Deluxe's Digital First Journey
Once they went through that, the next thing was like, "How do we get there?" When they looked at all of the pieces, the digital first and then the trust piece of it, when you look at the trust piece, a lot of it looks like your shift-left strategy. You want to shift left. You want to make sure you're automating. You're getting that feedback as soon as possible so that you're able to move there quickly.
In 2021, they were using Jenkins and a whole bunch of different CI/CD platforms. The challenges that they had were they really couldn't move fast enough. There was too much code to be written. There was too much to be done. Templatizing was a challenge. Ultimately, they went back to the market to say, "Hey, who are some of the providers?" So, they decided to go with Harness.
🎉 The Impact of Harness
Overall, putting the CI and the CD in place, they used to have CD through Jenkins. They're generally putting the CI and CD in place, taking some of the time that their operations and implementation teams used in some of their products, which used to take about three weeks to four weeks to set up. They were able to bring that down to about 30 to 45 minutes, which was a huge saving, which also made sure that they could redeploy their resources, their engineers into something that is more valuable from both their perspective and their company's perspective.
📈 Deluxe's Future
Deluxe is on a journey to become a digital-first platform. They've made the pivots, and they understand that being digital first is not a destination; it's just a point in time. So, today, they are there, but tomorrow they're going to have to continue to move. It's the same thing with trust. It has to be earned every day. It has to be earned with every interaction that they have with their customers. They're not going to take that for granted. They're going to continue to move forward, and as they continue to move forward, the Harness delivery platform is going to be a big player for them. It's going to be a big partnership.
🎉 Highlights
- Deluxe is a leading provider of payments, data products, and platform services.
- Deluxe has been around for over a century and has been helping transform businesses for 100 years.
- Deluxe was founded by Jr Hotchkiss in 1914-1915, who invented the personal checkbook or personalized checkbook that could be used both by businesses and by individuals.
- Deluxe was ranked the 11 most trustworthy financial services company in America two years in a row.
- Deluxe is on a journey to become a digital-first platform.
❓ FAQ
Q: What is Deluxe?
A: Deluxe is a leading provider of payments, data products, and platform services.
Q: Who founded Deluxe?
A: Deluxe was founded by Jr Hotchkiss in 1914-1915.
Q: What did Jr Hotchkiss invent?
A: Jr Hotchkiss invented the personal checkbook or personalized checkbook that could be used both by businesses and by individuals.
Q: What is Deluxe's ranking?
A: Deluxe was ranked the 11 most trustworthy financial services company in America two years in a row.
Q: What is Deluxe's journey?
A: Deluxe is on a journey to become a digital-first platform.
