Why legacy processors are a thing of the past
As the world shifts towards digitization, it is critical for payment systems to support 24/7 processing. The global rise in terms of the volume of transactions that are performed either online (e-commerce) or on POS has made it difficult for legacy processors to find off-peak hours for system maintenance or upgrades.
This challenge to avoid any down period or interruption that could affect the customers has resulted in Paymentology developing a multi-region program called active/active. The program manages traffic coming into our transaction processing engine from the UK and Singapore through card schemes, such as VISA and MasterCard. As a result, active/active solutions will deliver 99.999% uptime which brings huge benefits to banks and the relationships with their customers.
Card schemes generally offer two or more connections on one site to banks and processors. And if the bank/processor is connected to all those connections, the card scheme will send the transactions from each connection in a round-robin sequence. Paymentology’s processing platform is connected to card schemes from multiple connections, which means we receive transactions from four lines. This aspect of our processing platform ensures that we possess the ability to process those transactions in parallel without any latency.
The issue of processing transactions during disruptive events such as site maintenance is also addressed with the active/active processing solution.
Multiple instances of our payment processing platform solutions are implemented on dedicated servers. This guarantees that critical transaction services continue to be processed during any type of disruption or downtime at either regional site.
The architecture is completely modular. For example, if we talk about authorization flow, the authorization, tokenization and rules engine are independent. Thus, there is no single point of failure resulting in high redundancy. The modules can be maintained without impacting the overall efficiency of the platform.
In addition, the use of instances greatly reduces the risk of a bank failing to meet SLA’s as result of maintenance or disruption. This ensures that us Paymentologists can focus on creating and integrating innovative solutions with less risk of the operational side of the bank faltering. Legacy systems don’t have the technology to support a bank through its digital transformation and can hinder the opportunity for banks to launch innovative personalised financial products in good time.
Paymentology’s active/active solution through its superior design delivers the following benefits:
• Supports uninterrupted transaction processing
• Ensures high availability, business continuity and increased service levels
• Facilitates full transaction integrity — our platform is demonstrably correct 24/7
• Reduces and prevents failover, failback, or reconfiguration
• Affects only a segment of the entire system during planned downtimes
• Ensures that downtime is transparent to parties upstream or downstream from the system
Bilal Hashmi CSM CSPO, Implementation Manager at Paymentology.
Bilal has over 10 years’ experience in the Cards and Payment industry in the areas of Clearing and Settlement in both Acquirer and Issuer processing (ATM, CDM, IB, POS, Bill Payment, Merchant billing), networks (VISA, MasterCard, JCB, UPI) and switches.
About Paymentology
Paymentology is a global issuer payment processor working with banks, challengers, program managers and third-party vendors.
Cloud native and highly scalable, our innovative payment processing solution enables banks to take control over the customer spend journey via data analytics in real time.
We enable clients to focus on their core areas of business with the assurance that they have the flexibility and control they need over their card processing functions.
Furthermore, it is essential in the cards and payment industry to secure customer and transaction data; with the active/active solution, we have ensured that our environments are secured across all regions with the use of high level of encryption to store sensitive data safely.