Context
RIPSA operates a tax and service collection network with over 1,000 service points distributed nationwide. With the advance of the digital payments ecosystem driven by Argentina’s Central Bank (BCRA) through the Transfers 3.0 scheme, the opportunity — and the need — arose to enable interoperable QR payment collection across the entire network, without disrupting existing operations.
The Challenge
Integrating the Transfers 3.0 scheme into a national-scale network involved several simultaneous fronts: meeting BCRA regulatory requirements, ensuring interoperability with all digital wallets and banking apps in the market, and maintaining service availability under a load of +50,000 daily transactions across +1,000 branches nationwide, with constrained response times and zero tolerance for downtime during business hours.
The Solution
The Transfers 3.0 QR Payments integration was designed and implemented on top of RIPSA’s existing infrastructure, with the following key components:
Interoperable QR generation and resolution — implementation of the EMVCo standard compatible with the Transfers 3.0 scheme, allowing any digital wallet or banking app registered with the BCRA to read and process codes generated by the network.
Asynchronous and resilient processing — payment confirmation flows were processed through message queues, decoupling QR generation from bank confirmation and ensuring no transaction is lost in the event of transient failures.
Complete transaction traceability — OpenTelemetry instrumentation that allows tracking the complete lifecycle of each transaction, from QR generation to bank confirmation, with distributed traces that facilitate operational diagnostics and auditing of every transaction.
Internal management system — an administration platform aimed at RIPSA’s operations team, centralizing the management of collection points, users, transaction states and system configurations, optimizing processes that previously required manual intervention or direct database access.
Horizontal scalability — the architecture was able to absorb demand spikes without service degradation, sustaining the required concurrency levels on mass due-date days.
Impact
- +1,000 collection points enabled to accept interoperable QR payments nationwide
- +50,000 daily transactions processed with high availability and complete traceability
- End-to-end traceability of every transaction, enabling agile auditing and diagnostics on any incident
- Internal management system that eliminated manual processes and reduced operational dependency on technical profiles
- Significant reduction in operational times compared to traditional in-person collection
- Consolidated competitive advantage over other payment networks in the Argentine market
- Full regulatory compliance with the BCRA’s Transfers 3.0 scheme
Technologies
- .NET — backend and transaction processing
- Hangfire — scheduled tasks and Fire-and-Forget events
- SQL Server — transaction persistence
- OpenTelemetry — end-to-end distributed traceability
- Polly — resilience in external integrations