advancedExplaining Your Decisions

Switching Payment Providers

Decide what you would do from the brief alone. Everything below it is available, but the exercise stops working if you open it first.

The situation you were handed

CTO: "The new payment provider offers lower fees. Finance wants to switch next quarter. Can you evaluate it and tell us if we should go ahead? We can always switch back if it does not work out."

The trap — the move that looks right

Accepting "we can always switch back" and wrapping both providers behind an abstraction layer to make it true. The abstraction covers the API calls, which were never the hard part. The stored cards, the fraud tuning and the chargeback history stay with whichever provider has them, and the team now maintains an interface that hides exactly the differences they needed to see.