A loyalty engine built for 300,000 transactions a day — on Oracle Cloud.
How Divante built a production-grade loyalty platform for Drop Tank, a US loyalty program provider serving Fortune 500 fuel brands — customising Open Loyalty from the ground up and deploying it on Oracle Cloud with Kubernetes.
Background
Drop Tank provides loyalty programs for major fuel brands and Fortune 500 convenience store operators across the United States. Loyalty in fuel retail is both high-volume and technically demanding, and any latency or downtime directly affects the customer experience at thousands of forecourt locations.
The company had previously attempted to solve this with two separate SaaS loyalty products. Both failed to deliver because limited customisation and control made them unsuitable for Drop Tank’s clients.
The Challenge
The requirements for a new loyalty platform were exacting:
- Handle 300,000+ daily transactions reliably
- Deploy on Oracle Cloud — a non-negotiable requirement given Drop Tank’s existing Oracle enterprise partnership
- Deep customisability at every layer, from earning rules to customer profiles to fraud detection
- API-first architecture for integration with pump systems, POS terminals, and mobile apps
- A team willing to make fundamental changes to the platform to meet these requirements
Our Solution
After a discovery phase and deep gap analysis against Drop Tank’s full requirements, Divante served as system integrator for the Open Loyalty platform. The work required extensive custom development across every layer of the system: extended customer profiles and customer statuses; time zone support for promotion scheduling; earning rules categories and custom metadata; period-based point earning limitations; product exclusions and extended import capabilities; and custom fraud detection logic.
The most technically complex element was the Oracle requirement. Open Loyalty uses PostgreSQL by default; deploying on Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) required overriding significant portions of the Doctrine database mapping library — a deep engineering challenge that the Divante team solved during the engagement.
Impact & Results
- The platform was built to handle 300,000+ transactions per day after full release
- The solution launched on January 4th, replacing two previously failed SaaS loyalty products with a platform Drop Tank owns and controls
- Drop Tank’s CTO described the willingness of the Open Loyalty / Divante team to make fundamental platform changes as “huge” — directly addressing the limitation that had caused both previous SaaS implementations to fail
That’s when we sat down and said, “We’ve had two passes at loyalty. Both of them SaaS products, both of them products that we can’t control.” We needed to have a loyalty engine that we could extend. That’s how we landed on Open Loyalty.