Wednesday 30 July 2014

Scalability by Parallelizability in Online payment gateway

Scalability and responsiveness in online payment gateway is not an option, it is a requirement. Some optional steps/process in a payment gateway performed in a parallel/asynchronous way can help in maintaining scalability of the system.  This parallelism will enable the system for betterment in latency and throughput. While some processes can only be performed in a sequential fashion, but the system designer should always check for processes which can be performed in an asynchronous way.

Following are some optional processes in an online payment gateway, which I think can be performed in parallel:
  1. Fraud and Risk Prevention check: A check made for detection of a possible fraud in the transaction under process

  2. Sending Email: Sending emails to buyers, merchants, self and any other third parties.

  3. Sending SMS: SMS to the buyer

  4. Dynamic currency conversion related processing: Dynamic currency conversion can sometime be performed in parallel

  5. Sending online notifications to merchants: Some payment systems send HTTPS notifications to merchants

  6. Account updater: When card details of the buyer has changed, and an update is required
  7. Tokenization/One-Click-Checkout process: Tokenization or one-click-checkout or easy checkout is sometime used to speed up the checkout process, and this is mainly achieved by storing the card details for future use

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Thursday 24 July 2014

Batch modules in Payment gateway and technology


The major part of a payment gateway is the back-end and batch modules. In this blog I will mainly focus on batch modules in payment gateways, functions and one example of batch processing technology. Front end of payment gateway accepts online real time authorization requests, and after this the back-end finishes/completes the request. Batch modules in payment gateway mainly serve back office operations, analytics, reports, settlement/clearing and End of day processing. Let us we have a look at each of the functionality mentioned above.

  • Clearing & Settlement: This mainly involves transfer of funds from different entities like issuer to acquirer, payment gateway to merchant. It is mainly achieved by iterating over each of the online real time requests accepted from merchants and then creating a batch file, sending to acquirer/payment processor, receiving response file, parsing the response file and updating the database

  • Reconciliation & Reports: Merchants and other financial entities require different kind of reports in different kind of formats. For example daily/weekly/monthly transactional reports, totals of different kind of transactions and summary

  • Analytics: This mainly involves identifying different kind of parameters. For example, identification of potential business areas, who is doing what, what kind of transactions, is more from which merchant etc. Depending upon the flexibility and adaptability of analytics module, it can be much importance as an added service to merchants.

Technology selection for your payment gateway is of critical importance. The batch modules will be creating, parsing, sending/receiving and updating different file formats. Batch modules also perform database intensive operations, and would mainly run as scheduled tasks configured at particular time or internal of time.

Let us see why spring batch can be a module of choice. Spring Batch is a lightweight, comprehensive batch framework designed to enable the development of robust batch applications vital for the daily operations of enterprise systems. Spring Batch builds upon the productivity, POJO-based development approach, and general ease of use capabilities people have come to know from the Spring Framework, while making it easy for developers to access and leverage more advance enterprise services when necessary. It is intended to work in conjunction with a scheduler, not replace a scheduler.

Spring Batch provides reusable functions that are essential in processing large volumes of records, including logging/tracing, transaction management, job processing statistics, job restart, skip, and resource management. It also provides more advance technical services and features that will enable extremely high-volume and high performance batch jobs though optimization and partitioning techniques. Simple as well as complex, high-volume batch jobs can leverage the framework in a highly scalable manner to process significant volumes of information.


Spring batch can serve the following technical objectives:
  1. Batch developers use the Spring programming model: concentrate on business logic; let the framework take care of infrastructure.
  2. Clear separation of concerns between the infrastructure, the batch execution environment, and the batch application.
  3. Provide common, core execution services as interfaces that all projects can implement.
  4. Provide simple and default implementations of the core execution interfaces that can be used ‘out of the box’.
  5. Easy to configure, customize, and extend services, by leveraging the spring framework in all layers.

All existing core services should be easy to replace or extend, without any impact to the infrastructure layer.  Provide a simple deployment model, with the architecture JARs completely separate from the application.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment

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Sunday 13 April 2014

Tokenization – A solution for Security, Convenience and compliance

You have heard about tokenization or tokenization in payments, let me explain what tokenization in payments is “Merchants who accept card details on their payment page, can send the card number and expiration date to some third party (token provider) via a web service (or any other API) and in response merchant will get a token number against the card details, this token number can be used in future to get the actual card number and expiration date from the same token provider” The token number is generated by such algorithms that card details cannot be derived from token number.

At an abstract level tokenization can provide a merchant with

1    1) Increased online sales: Express checkout or one click checkout can be achieved using tokenization. This improves the checkout process dramatically by reducing the checkout time and added security; this also decreases the chances of transaction failure due to invalid card details. These kinds of services also promote the customer to return to merchant page for future requirements.

2    2) More security and reduced PCI DSS scope, as merchant is not storing card details on its system, so will be the reduced PCI DSS scope, and no fear of losing card details in a security breach.

3    3) Use of card details: Many online merchants usually have integration with more than one payment gateway, if tokenization system is independent of these payment gateways then the same card details can be used in any number of payment gateway. This provides the merchant with better flexibility and control.

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Any questions and comments are appreciated. Thanks for reading

Saturday 4 January 2014

EMV Compliant mobile payments in India and global trends


EMV compliant (Chip and PIN) based mobile solutions are going to dominate card present transaction space worldwide, and there are some global as well as domestic forces pushing things in this direction. Let us we put together some technologies and trends in card present transactions ecosystem. There are two parallel momentum talking place. 

Once is technological momentum
1. Mobile technologies offering convenience with usability and widespread use by new generation
2. Chip and PIN card (EMV), Chip based debit card from Rupay
3. Fraudsters developing advanced technical patters for breaking secure systems.

The other is
1. Global Migration to EMV, specially increase in adoption of EMV in US
2. Drives by RBI and NPCI. RBI has mandated issuance of Chip and PIN based card to card issuers.
3. Big eCommerce merchants allowing COD (cash on delivery) are migrating to mobile based card payment on delivery.
4. Drives by VISA, MasterCard and other payment schemes to mandate Chip and PIN based transactions in future

So let us welcome the change with new mobile based EMV compliant (Version 4.0, level 2) secure solutions, offering more transaction success rate, less number of chargeback’s, increased sales, conveyance & reliability, and finally new challengers and game changing innovators.

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Wednesday 1 January 2014

Choose the payment gateway which increases your sales

So you are running an online business and you accept online payments from your customers, and you will have to integrate with some payment gateway. This blog is about which payment gateway will better suite you, the conclusion upfront is "Choose the payment gateway which increases your sales/revenue". In other terms your payment gateway should be having

  • Highest transaction success rate

  • Advanced sales enhancement features like:
    • Facebook payments  
    • Payment retry option using click to pay button via email
    • Mobile payments
    • Payment through QR code
    • Support for merchant promotional program

  • CRM with sales analytic – find and target potential customers

  • Express checkout

  • PCI DSS compliant

  • Easy integration API’s with proper documentation and integration kit as per merchant's technological needs

  • Payment gateway payment page having look and feel similar to merchant page, so that customer feels at home and safe

  • Fraud and Risk management system – this feature of payment gateway can help merchants be protected from sophisticated frauds and chargeback

Using the right set of tools and technologies’ supporting your online business is need of the hour. If such a payment gateway increases your sales by 5% then this could be a jackpot.

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Potential Micro-Services in a Payment Gateway

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