Engineering Trust In The Wallet Age: Vijay Soni On Building Secure, Open Payments

Over the next three years digital wallets are expected to handle more than 40 percent of global e-commerce checkouts, a share that will keep rising as shoppers grow accustomed to paying with a tap rather than a card number. Meeting that demand safely is proving harder than simply adding a “Pay” button: regulators now require Financial-grade API (FAPI) conformance, threat actors automate credential-stuffing attacks, and every millisecond shaved from checkout time translates into millions of dollars recovered from abandoned carts. In short, the payments stack has become the front line of consumer trust.

Inside Vijay Soni’s Architecture Playbook

“It isn’t enough to write code that works,” says Vijay Kumar Soni, an expert enterprise architect who has spent the past 17 years designing payment rails for a leading U.S. card network. “You have to prove—cryptographically and operationally—that it can’t be tricked.” His current remit stretches from FAPI 2.0-compliant open-banking APIs to the mobile SDKs that merchants embed in their checkout pages. Soni’s toolkit is equally broad: micro-services on AWS, event-driven tokenization engines, and a security layer that blends OAuth 2.0, asymmetric cryptography and risk-based authentication.

Soni leads more than 50 engineers spread across North America, Europe and India. “We organise around customer journeys, not org charts,” he notes, pointing to the OKR framework he uses to slice business goals into fortnightly deliverables. Past wins include launching Apple Pay, Google Pay and Click-to-Pay for millions of cardholders, and supervising a multi-cloud migration that cut latency by 27 percent while meeting stringent PCI-DSS controls. Colleagues credit Soni’s dual fluency—he can diagram a zero-trust edge on a whiteboard and explain interchange economics to an executive board—for keeping projects funded and on schedule.

From Chip Cards to Cloud Wallets

Soni’s career began in Pune and London, where he guided American Express through its first EMV “chip-and-PIN” rollout. “Those projects taught me that security is a moving target,” he recalls. The lesson stuck: he earned the CSCIP/Payments credential to deepen his smart-card expertise, followed by the AWS Solutions Architect (Associate) badge to master cloud primitives. Last year he added ISC2’s globally recognized CCSP certification—often cited as one of the fastest-growing credentials in cloud security—to formalise his architecture chops.

That mix of theory and practice shows in Soni’s recent work. When U.S. regulators signalled that the newer FAPI 2.0 security profile would soon become baseline for consumer-data sharing, Soni re-factored his network’s OAuth servers to support pushed-authorization requests and mutual-TLS, measures formally verified under the FAPI 2.0 attacker model finalised in February 2025. His team then wrapped those controls in a developer-friendly SDK so that fintechs could integrate in days, not months, without sacrificing non-functional requirements such as 200-ms P95 latency and regional data residency.

Soni’s remit is not limited to green-field builds. He has steered brown-field refactors that retired decades-old COBOL credit-authorization code, replacing it with stateless micro-services fronted by Amazon API Gateway and shielded by HashiCorp Vault. By coupling Circuit-Breaker patterns with DynamoDB-backed idempotency keys, he reduced duplicate debit risk to near-zero even during Black-Friday spikes. “Modernisation is less about ripping out mainframes and more about carving out seams where new services can breathe,” he says.

Mentorship rounds out his portfolio. Soni chairs an internal “Architecture Wednesdays” forum where junior engineers present design docs for peer review, and he volunteers with industry working groups shaping the next iteration of Payments message standards. The cross-provincial nature of those forums reinforces his multi-national outlook: “Payments are universal, but every market has its quirks. My job is translating those nuances into reusable, secure patterns.”

Why Secure, Open Banking Matters Next (20 %)

With the OpenID Foundation declaring FAPI 2.0 a final specification this year, banks and fintechs now face a compliance clock that will tighten API certifications and expose brittle legacy gateways. Soni believes the transition offers an inflection point. “Open banking forces everyone to raise the bar. If we get the security right, the ecosystem can innovate on loyalty, real-time risk scoring and even wallet-native credit,” he argues.

That vision dovetails with broader market trends: research shows digital-payments revenue could top $3 trillion by 2028, driven largely by wallets and instant transfers. Soni’s future research roadmap includes extending his platform’s token-vault to support cloud-payment rails and embedding AI-based fraud models directly inside the API layer. Yet he insists that the human element will stay central: “Technology only matters if people trust it. My north star is making every tap, click or biometric handshake feel effortless—and provably safe.”

In a landscape where milliseconds equate to revenue and a single breach can crater consumer confidence, Vijay Kumar Soni’s blend of cryptographic rigor, cloud pragmatism and coach-like leadership offers a blueprint for payments engineers navigating the wallet age.

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