Design and Architecture of a Payment Operation Platform

The payment operation platform is an internal service tool for payment company staff—including developers, testers, product personnel, settlement staff, finance, and customer service—to query transaction, merchant, and rate information, handle on‑call issues, monitor services, and perform reconciliation and adjustments.

Initially, when transaction volume was low, all payment functions were bundled into a single system with a simple Spring MVC‑based management interface directly accessing the database. As business grew, the monolithic system became a bottleneck due to tight coupling and performance limits, prompting a modular split into subsystems (acquisition, settlement, accounting, merchant management) and corresponding database partitioning.

After the split, the operation platform faced challenges such as cross‑data‑source queries and security compliance, requiring a redesign for higher availability.

Business logic analysis identifies distinct user groups and their needs, guiding the platform’s functional architecture to support data aggregation, modification, and real‑time queries across multiple backend systems.

Design principles emphasize usability, learnability, security, and efficiency: the UI should be simple for internal users, require minimal training, protect sensitive data (e.g., merchant licenses, transaction details), and provide fast response times for customer‑facing queries.

The system adopts a front‑end/back‑end separation. The back‑end acts as a business router, invoking appropriate subsystem APIs, consolidating responses, and returning data to the front‑end. Direct database access is avoided for security and compliance.

Permission management is central; a dedicated RBAC‑based permission service is recommended, exposing an SDK for internal services to enforce fine‑grained access control.

Technical architecture incorporates audit logging, watermarking, unified approval workflows, and integration with a security center. The overall diagram (shown in the original images) illustrates the layered components, data flow, and interaction points.