Payments & Fraud in EdTech

Problem

Telecom learning platforms cannot bolt mobile money and fraud screening onto Moodle. Carrier billing requires async settlement, operator APIs, and synchronous fraud checks — with scaling independent from course delivery.

Constraints

• Evina DCBprotect mandatory in the payment path
• Separate PostgreSQL for payment domain vs Moodle MySQL
• Celery workers for async operator callbacks
• 11 stakeholders across operator, fraud vendor, and platform teams

My role

As Technical Manager at Campusna, I led payment service architecture, Evina integration, and ECS service topology separate from the LMS — directing implementation across the engineering team.

Outcome

• Payment API and workers on ECS Fargate alongside Moodle
• Host-based ALB routing — LMS and payment API on separate paths
• ~40% payment/API performance improvement on integration layer
• Production validation with ~2,000 pre-registered users

Lessons learned

• Treat payments as a bounded context — not a Moodle plugin
• Fraud screening belongs in the synchronous billing path for operator trust
• Scale workers on queue depth, not LMS page views