Hi, and welcome to 'This is My Architecture.'
I'm Don, and I'm joined by Manish with 7-Eleven.
Hey, Don. Hi, good day.
So tell us a little bit about 7-Eleven.
Yeah, so, we are the biggest convenience retailer in the world,
and we have been on a digital journey for the last 4 years.
Part of the digital journey is 7-Eleven Wallet, and that's what I'm here to talk about today.
Great. So can you talk to us about the architecture that we have on the board here,
related to the experience with the Digital Wallet?
Yeah, so, our customers interact with the Digital Wallet in two ways.
One is at the POS, another is at the mobile device.
So let's take an example of a customer walking into the store,
and trying to enable Digital Wallet and load 20 bucks on it.
So, he will go to the cashier where the cashier will cue him to
scan the barcode, now, there is one step needed, which is,
we want your phone number to be verified, if you're using Digital Wallet, for fraud purposes.
So you tap on it, you put in your phone number, and your phone number is verified.
What we do is, the mobile device reaches out to API Gateway which then uses AWS Pinpoint
to verify that the phone number is the real phone number.
Once that phone number is verified, then he moves on to scanning his barcode at the POS,
where the POS then goes to our external ledger, which is being hosted where the
Digital Wallet details are there, where it says, load 20 bucks on that card.
OK, so I'm assuming since it's external, that you're actually leveraging something that is pre-existing?
Yeah, so, we had a lot of customers in our existing closed-loop gift card system.
We didn't want to lose that.
Starting from scratch would mean everyone has to transition
and time and money, so what we did was, we took that and we digitized it by building this,
where this stack is what mobile uses primarily, and this direct interaction still stays in place.
OK, so how does that closed loop and the digital ledger,
how does that interact with your architecture?
Yeah, so, there are two ways it interacts.
One, we reach into the digital ledger from the AWS ecosystem.
The other is, they're coming back.
So for interactions that happen in the POS and go to the ledger,
the way we find out about it is, there is a message that comes to Gateway,
and it comes to SQS, and it is consumed by our Lambdas,
and the Lambdas push the data in our database.
That way, all changes that happen here, our database stays in sync here.
Now, the interaction which happens reverse, like you ordered something for delivery here,
well, the mobile device is going to reach out to API Gateway, which again will go to Lambda
and then Lambda will reach out to the digital ledger to update, decrease/add,
and also store it on our database.
OK, so I assume that this is kind of a near real-time flow from the digital ledger
through API Gateway, processed by your Lambda functions.
So also, I think, some key takeaways, the architecture is extensible,
you have Lambda functions, you have an SQS message,
and then you also have MongoDB, which is going to give you that extensibility
from a document store perspective.
What is the purpose of EventBridge in this architecture?
Yeah, so, we have a stack on the other side of EventBridge
that takes care of all customer interactions.
So, if a customer, we need to update your balance, or we need to send out a message to you, all that.
So what happens is, whenever we need to reach out to the customer,
we put a message on EventBridge, and it goes out to another ecosystem,
which is the loyalty ecosystem, and the loyalty ecosystem will let the customer know:
Your balance is too low, or actually update the balance on the phone,
or send out marketing messages.
That's what sits on the other side.
OK, so, do you work with partners?
Is that loyalty system completely homegrown?
What's going on over there?
So, that stack is our own, now, just like the ledger, we do have an external system there too,
which is a loyalty company, external loyalty company, but all interactions
directly go from our stack and only use the external loyalty company when there is
a loyalty change, like your point balance went up or down, or we award you points
for using Wallet, those things go to that loyalty hosting also.
OK, interesting. So, what's next with the overall system?
So, the biggest part of this is going to be adoption.
How [many] customers are cash customers,
and we have built this out so that all those cash customers can use our other capabilities,
like loyalty and delivery and fuel rewards, etc.
So the next point would be adoption.
We have to get the adoption high, where our customers need to trust the ecosystem and
trust us with giving us their dollars for the item and using it for delivery
and other capabilities.
Well thank you very much for sharing this innovative architecture.
This seems like you've taken the same digital experience for someone who is paying with a credit card.
You've brought that to your cash-based customers, and you've allowed them to participate
in a rewarding system, a loyalty-based system.
Thank you very much for your time today. Thank you.
And thank you.