Payments are maturing into a utility layer for the global economy.
The unsung heroes of the sector’s operations can increasingly determine which companies can grow with confidence and which will falter.
“My infrastructure team, cloud, site reliability and database are remarkable,” One Inc Chief Information Officer Elizabeth Hoemeke told PYMNTS during a discussion for the What’s Next in Payments Series, “Unsung Heroes.”
“They don’t get enough kudos and credit … but they move the needle very quietly behind the scenes,” Hoemeke said.
That quiet work is foundational. As One Inc itself scales toward larger, tier-one insurance carriers, expectations around uptime, security and recoverability escalate. High availability is no longer aspirational; it is contractual. Over the past year, One Inc completed a step change in resilience by implementing multi-region disaster recovery across its products.
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“We already had a high availability configuration, but this year we implemented, through our infrastructure group, high multi-region DR,” Hoemeke said.
This was not a compliance exercise.
“We don’t just tabletop exercise it,” she said. “We are now executing a full failover every quarter for both of our products.”
Those rehearsals matter. Each failover surfaces new insights, edge cases and opportunities to harden systems further. The payoff comes not just in theoretical resilience, but in real-world crisis response.
Orchestrating an Expanding Ecosystem While Maintaining Resilience
Payments resilience today extends beyond internal systems. Platforms like One Inc operate within dense ecosystems of banks, payment service providers, digital wallets and insurers. Orchestrating those relationships requires technical sophistication and operational accountability.
One Inc’s approach starts with “high availability, multi-region DR” and extensive automation around monitoring and alerting, Hoemeke said. It also depends on tight collaboration across product development, engineering, security and compliance.
“Those four pillars work very closely together … just to make sure that we’re thinking of everything as we do that design,” she said.
Infrastructure in this context is not treated as a cost center or a reactive function, but as an enabling layer for product innovation.
“Our engineers just want to put hands on the keyboard,” Hoemeke said. “They want to do great work.”
On the external side, One Inc integrates with a range of payment providers, including Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle, and traditional banking partners like JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bank. The goal is breadth without fragility.
“We are trying to meet every client that we have where they want us to be,” Hoemeke said.
Identity, Risk and Invisible Security Are Infrastructure Tentpoles
Scalability, reliability and security standards are increasingly non-negotiable in today’s always-on environment. As One Inc scales, identity and fraud controls have become central to its architecture. Like many payment platforms, it faces persistent automated attacks.
“BIN attacks are really prevalent,” Hoemeke said, referring to fraud attempts that exploit card number patterns.
Identity federation is another resilience pillar. Single sign-on via security assertion markup language allows carrier partners to integrate seamlessly while reducing credential sprawl. Strong multifactor authentication policies, improved audit trails, and Microsoft Entra as a trusted identity provider form part of what Hoemeke described as a defense-in-depth strategy.
Looking ahead, One Inc is exploring risk-based authentication with an emphasis on adaptive controls that escalate only when risk justifies it.
Underlying these capabilities is a deliberate architectural consolidation. Over the past several years, One Inc migrated its platforms fully into Microsoft Azure, choosing focus over multi-cloud complexity.
“We chose to centralize into Azure so that we could take advantage of human-scale training,” Hoemeke said.
Standardization allows engineers to spend less time context-switching and more time building differentiated capabilities.
The company is leaning into cloud-native patterns, API-first design and event-driven architectures. New services are being built as composable components on Kubernetes, enabling faster iteration and clearer ownership.
“We want to focus our engineering efforts on our own IP,” Hoemeke said, rather than rebuilding commodity capabilities already offered by hyperscalers.
Data sits at the center of this strategy. Extensive data warehouses support internal analytics and client-facing insights, helping insurers understand payment trends and customer behavior over time. In an industry where margins are tight and expectations are rising, such visibility increasingly differentiates platforms.
The future of payments, it turns out, depends less on what launches next than on what quietly holds everything together.
