A Retail Chain in West Africa Protects Its E-Commerce and Payment Infrastructure from Certificate Expiry with eMudhra CertiNext

Client Overview

The organisation is a multi-format retail chain operating across two West African countries with 85 physical stores and a growing e-commerce platform that has become an increasingly significant revenue channel. The company processes card payments across stores and online, and its payment infrastructure is integrated with two acquiring banks and a mobile money platform. Maintaining uninterrupted, trusted connections across these systems is essential to the company's retail and e-commerce operations.

The Challenge

The company's IT team was managing certificates across the e-commerce platform, payment gateway integrations, store management systems, and the internal corporate network using a mix of vendor reminders and manually maintained renewal schedules. The team was small — three people covering all of IT — and certificate renewals were handled reactively when reminders arrived rather than proactively. A certificate on the mobile money payment integration expired over a holiday weekend, disabling mobile money checkout on the e-commerce platform for two days during a promotional sales period. The loss of mobile money checkout — the preferred payment method for a significant portion of the company's online customers — noticeably impacted sales over those two days. The company's CFO asked IT leadership to review and address the certificate management process.

“Losing mobile money checkout for two days during a promotional period hurt our numbers in a way that got the CFO's attention. For a small IT team, a tool that handles certificate renewals automatically is not a luxury — it is a necessity.”
— IT Director

The Solution

eMudhra deployed CertiNext to manage the company's certificate estate across the e-commerce platform, payment integrations, store systems, and corporate network. Given the small IT team, the deployment was configured to be as automated as possible — renewal workflows required minimal manual intervention, with the IT director receiving a weekly digest of the certificate estate status rather than individual renewal alerts for each certificate. Payment integration certificates were classified as business-critical, with renewal workflows triggered at 90 days and automatic escalation to the IT director and CFO if any payment integration certificate entered the 30-day window without a renewal in progress. A private CA was set up for internal store-network certificates. The initial discovery scan identified 70 certificates, including four approaching renewal without active processes.

Results

The four near-expiry certificates were addressed in the first week. In the 14 months since deployment, the company has had no payment integration or e-commerce platform disruptions caused by certificate issues. The IT team reports that certificate management, previously an ad hoc activity, now requires minimal attention.