How Nickel ensures seamless payments for millions of users with Gatling Enterprise Edition

Why performance matters at Nickel 

Every month, during social benefit disbursements, Nickel experiences massive traffic spikes, with load increasing by a factor of twenty to thirty for one or two days. Yet every authorization and transaction must still complete in under three seconds. 

Beyond handling these surges, Nickel continually launches new payment features such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and soon Wero. Each new integration adds backend dependencies that must stay within strict latency thresholds. 

Before adopting Gatling, Nickel had no systematic way to validate infrastructure performance under these extreme, real-world conditions. 

We needed a process to ensure that everything would work properly during the most demanding periods. Without that, we were flying blind.

‍— Alexandre Baert, Pre-production Platform Manager 

Why performance matters at Nickel

Nickel first adopted Gatling Community Edition to validate the stability of its systems. Alexandre already knew Gatling from previous projects and immediately saw it as a natural fit. 

I had used Gatling before to stress-test cloud environments, and it worked perfectly. The syntax and philosophy made total sense for us. 

‍— Alexandre Baert, Pre-production Platform Manager 

The open-source version quickly became a standard tool for the teams, seamlessly integrating with their Java and Scala environment. As Nickel’s needs evolved, the company moved to Gatling Enterprise Edition to gain centralized visibility, collaboration, and governance, while benefiting from enterprise-grade support and updates. 

Nickel’s testing strategy 

Performance tests are a mandatory step in Nickel’s release process. Before any deployment, applications must “show a clean record” during a load test to prove there is no performance degradation compared to the previous version. This validation is part of the Change Advisory Board (CAB) review. 

This approach helps create a technical fingerprint for each application, ensuring that performance remains stable release after release and that no regression goes unnoticed. 

Today, Nickel runs all performance tests in a single pre-production environment to mirror production conditions as closely as possible. Because this environment is shared, test execution is carefully scheduled to prevent overlapping simulations on nearby databases or Kubernetes nodes. 

Using the Private Locations feature, Nickel deploys its own load generators directly within its private, on-premises environment, a key security and compliance prerequisite for a banking application. 

What they test 

Nickel focuses primarily on the most business-critical scenario: the ability for users to pay and be paid without interruption. 

All backend services involved in payment authorization and fund transfers are continuously validated to guarantee that, even under extreme load, every transaction goes through. From 20 to 500 Virtual Users per seconds on the payment authorization flow, with 20 to 30 runs per month, increasing each month.

Test maintenance 

Each product team owns and maintains its own test scenarios in Git, following a test-as-code approach. Alexandre’s Platform Tools and Services team assists with environment setup, authentication secrets, and permissions management, ensuring consistency and control across the organization. 

How Gatling Enterprise Edition helped Nickel achieve its results ‍

The transition from Community Edition to Enterprise Edition was straightforward. Teams reused their existing simulations and immediately gained access to advanced features like multi-run comparison, centralized reporting, and user management. 

Run comparison is a big one. We used to export CSVs and graphs by hand. Now we compare runs directly and get useful insights in real time. 

‍— Alexandre Baert, Pre-production Platform Manager 

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Gatling Enterprise Edition has become a cornerstone of Nickel’s pre-production validation process, helping the company: 

• Detect regressions early 
• Provide auditable proof of reliability to regulators 
• Ensure compliance with internal performance standards

It has also supported major milestones such as the secure launches of Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other regulatory initiatives requiring proof of resilience under heavy load. 

The most visible impact has been on Nickel’s core banking system. What used to be a  stressful, error-prone deployment process is now seamless: 

Three years ago, releasing our core banking system meant days of stress. Today, deployments are stable and invisible to our users. 

‍— Alexandre Baert, Pre-production Platform Manager 

By combining Gatling Enterprise Edition with a stronger pre-production process, Nickel transformed performance testing from a one-time control into an ongoing assurance of reliability and customer trust. 

What’s next for Nickel? 

Nickel now plans to integrate Gatling Enterprise Edition directly into its CI/CD pipelines to run automated tests on a set of twenty critical applications. The goal is to move from manual validation to continuous, data-driven performance monitoring. The team also plans to simulate denial-of-service conditions to harden platform resilience.