Mollie Payments maximizes operational efficiency using Temporal

Mollie Payments is a European financial services company specializing in simplifying online payment processing for businesses of all sizes. The company focuses on driving revenue growth for its clients by creating seamless checkout experiences, managing fraud risks, and providing clear insights through an intuitive dashboard. Mollie empowers businesses to expand internationally with support for multiple currencies and quick customer onboarding processes.

The Challenge

As Mollie’s customer base expanded across Europe and into additional financial products, the company faced operational challenges:

• Regulatory Compliance: Annual remediation processes required verifying and updating customer details for over 150,000 clients, often under tight deadlines.
• Operational Inefficiencies: Bottlenecks in work distributions during verifications left up to 50 analysts idle due to failures in sending timely invites—a costly oversight.
• Scaling Limitations: Legacy onboarding systems, originally designed for a single market, struggled to handle the complexities of multiple markets and products.

Enhanced System Visibility & Support for Long Running Workflows with Temporal

With an expansion beyond payments into additional financial products, the need for a more flexible solution became evident. To address these challenges, the team evaluated three of solutions:

• Build an internal event-sourcing system.
• Use a drag-and-drop solution to create long-running workflows.
• Implement Temporal, embedding business logic directly into code.

Once aware of the options before them, the Mollie team built two proofs of concept—one using Temporal and another leveraging their homegrown event-sourcing system. These solutions were compared across key criteria: ease of development, code readability, potential for introducing errors, and how quickly new engineers could become productive. Temporal emerged as the clear winner due to:

• Workflow Readability: Temporal Workflows were easy for stakeholders, from engineers to C-level executives, to understand.
• Support for Long-Running Workflows: Temporal’s timers and Durable Execution eliminated the need for complex infrastructure, critical for onboarding processes that could span months.
• Enhanced Visibility: Temporal’s UI provided intuitive insights into workflows, bridging the gap between engineering and business teams.
• Proven Track Record: Temporal’s history and robust adoption among other companies gave Mollie confidence in its long-term viability.

The key thing that Temporal does is that it allows us to send encrypted information to Temporal Cloud that is also decrypted on our side… Temporal has no access to what [personal data] information we sent. We [Mollie] keep control of the personal information.

Implementing and Adopting Temporal at Mollie

Initially, Temporal was introduced within one team focused on periodic verifications. Over time, it organically expanded:

• Within the onboarding domain’s six teams, fostering collaboration and shared expertise.
• Across the organizations, with engineers carrying knowledge of Temporal into new domains and projects.
• Mollie prioritized demonstrating Temporal’s value by modeling a simplified process, showcasing reduced outages and increased reliability compared to legacy systems.

I think that everyone in Mollie that works with Temporal is really excited about the technology, and that also helps make it easy to keep them involved… and excited about what they’re building.

Benefits of Adopting Temporal

Operational Efficiency: Temporal streamlined Mollie’s remediation processes, ensuring precise batch invites for periodic verifications. This shift eliminated errors that previously left analysts without work, saving time and reducing errors.

Reliability: Since adopting Temporal, Mollie’s processes have seen a dramatic reduction in support tickets—only eight in two years—compared to frequent issues with the previous system.

Scalability: Temporal’s timers and workload balancing enabled Mollie to handle growth more effectively, scaling its verification processes to match a 20% annual increase in customer volume.

Improved Developer Experience: Engineers at Mollie report high satisfaction with Temporal, describing it as a reliable, enjoyable technology that allows them to focus on impactful projects rather than bug fixes.

Business Alignment: Temporal’s UI has become a critical tool for bridging the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders, enabling transparent communication about workflows and processes.

A Successful Adoption

Adopting Temporal has shifted the team’s mindset toward thinking in workflows, enabling them to identify more processes suited for this paradigm. While Temporal’s capabilities, such as automatic retries and durable execution, make it highly effective for solving specific problems, this shift can lead to overusing workflows as the default solution. The team now carefully considers when workflows are appropriate, ensuring they maximize the platform's benefits without overengineering.