Not much is worse in data security than a system that fails silently. It can create an outage and the potential for a company-wide disaster if the right redundancies aren’t in place.
At Felix, a fast-growing fintech serving Latino immigrants in the United States, users send money to Latin America via WhatsApp. The product is known for its simplicity, with a vision to offer services beyond remittances.
Cracks began appearing when outages and errors started occurring with their orchestration provider. The failures were impossible to isolate, with no clear signal pointing to the processor, orchestrator, or an internal system. Emilio Muñoz, Software Engineering Manager at Felix, said transaction statuses were quietly slipping out of sync, surfacing only as reporting discrepancies long after the damage was done.
Exactly the kind of silent failure that’s hardest to defend against.
“When you have a man in the middle, if something fails on a PSP (payment service provider) that you’re using, and you have this middle component, it’s hard to know what’s going wrong,” Muñoz explained. “It’s hard to realize who's at fault and how to move forward.”
The path forward was clear: build their own orchestration engine. The only missing piece was tokenization.
“As we began doing our homework, we realized the only missing piece was tokenization,” Muñoz says.
Tokenization would make it possible to build homegrown orchestration. But with payment infrastructure being core to their product, Muñoz explained that this decision couldn’t be rushed.
There were several factors Felix would be evaluating tokenization providers on, specifically:
And nothing was being left to chance.
“First of all, availability was very important to us,” Muñoz explains. “Then the pricing each provider offered is always a factor. But we asked our developers to get a grasp of how easy it was to integrate the different providers, and the capabilities each had.
“And, well, spoiler alert, we ended up with Basis Theory.”
Muñoz says after the availability and uptime concerns were met, Basis Theory’s pricing, proactiveness, and transparency won out.
“(Basis Theory) charges per-token, not per transaction,” Muñoz explained. “And the fact that your team lets us know when things do go wrong, even a small amount of downtime, none of the providers we have in Felix does that.”
Once Basis Theory was identified as the solution, the implementation and payment data migration was completed in less than eight weeks.
“The documentation was very straightforward,” says Santiago Ferreira, Senior Software Enginer at Felix. “I literally copy and paste the documentation guides. I didn’t face any issues with the integration.”
Felix had payment tokens held within their existing PSP, and migrating that data without disrupting a customer transaction created unique challenges.
However, Basis Theory worked directly with the PSP on Felix’s behalf to migrate the tokens.
“That was super smooth,” Muñoz said. “We scoped it for eight weeks, and it worked. Basis Theory provides these mechanisms to have smooth token transfers that will certainly have a big impact for us now, and in the future.”
Even after the implementation, when token usage scaled faster than projected, rather than being billed for the overage, Basis Theory reached out with a more suitable contract.
“We didn’t even notice, but then we were offered a better deal on the usage,” Muñoz says. “Our relationship with Basis Theory has been great, and the business model, charging per token, not per transaction, supports how we scale.”
With the migration behind them and their own orchestration engine running on Basis Theory's tokenization platform, the Felix team had something they didn't have before: full visibility and control. Without the middleman, the results were immediate.
Payment latency dropped by 50 percent, and authorization rates held steady throughout the migration. With token ownership now in hand, Felix expanded both its payment methods, and reach across Latin America.
For the first time, Felix’s payment team had full visibility into what was happening, and why.
“Because we have one less hop with the network, I knew we’d improve,” Muñoz says. “But I did not expect to improve that much.”
Token ownership unlocked the freedom to integrate directly, and independently with additional PSPs. The same flexibility applies to payment methods as well, with Felix enabling Apple Pay through Basis Theory.
“The Apple Pay integration was also very straightforward,” Ferreira says.
Silent failure is no longer a factor at Felix. For a company built on the premise of simplicity, the infrastructure can’t afford to. With token ownership and direct PSP relationships, Felix has visibility into anything that could block it from scaling.
“We own the tokens, so we can just go ahead and integrate directly with a PSP API,” Muñoz says. “We don’t have to rely on the orchestrator.”