Transaction Monitoring – who is watching the watchers?

Ask any financial IT operations team what their number one headache is, and the answer is likely to be unplanned downtime.

Reducing downtime is easily a top priority for IT professionals working for banks, card services and payment processing companies, where any lag or downtime within the payments processing system is unacceptable.

The challenge is that payment systems are getting more complex, rather than simpler which means ensuring large credit card and debit transactions are processed, without a hitch, is getting more difficult by the upgrade.

Often great lengths are taken to install active/active environments to reroute transactions should a bottleneck or failed switch occur in a payment environment. There are many benefits associated with active/active application architecture: more controlled planned downtime, capacity expansion, and load balancing to name a few.

However, there are disadvantages too. Other issues may flare up given the increasing infrastructure complexity, where multiple data centres present the risk of more places where things can go wrong within your payments environment. Problems can include network and application systems developing operational ‘blind spots’, causing transaction slowdowns or failures to occur and the fact that the more potential transaction paths there are, the higher the risk of third party and host connection issues, as well.

While many problematic scenarios may present, the opportunity lies in being able to keep a eye on every transaction path within the complex/active environment, developing and end-to-end view into every transaction.

So the answer to this complexity is to monitoring real-time performance of transactions within active/active architectures. Payments transactions and other banking service requests pass through numerous application components or ‘hops’ before they can be completed – moving from ATM, POS, mobile banking or internet banking applications, and sometimes third party services (such as Visa or Mastercard).

Essentially, we manage the complexity by adding just a little bit more complexity to the system. Which is why is vital that the monitoring solution chosen is as invisible to the payments environment as possible, not impacting the ability for the payments system to run at full efficiency.

The answer lies in partnering with trusted solution providers that understand both the benefits and challenges posed by active/active architectures, and in deploying a real-time transaction monitoring solution that is independent of your payments network architecture.

Knowing how to best manage this complex environment is Stanchion Payment Solutions area of expertise.

With over 160 years of payments expertise, Stanchion understands the challenges related to the deployment of an increasingly complex network infrastructure, knowing how to minimise the risk of downtime in transactional deployments. Since 2001 Stanchion has helped implement and manage payment environments and card applications for retailers, banks, credit unions, card schemes, payment processors and payment systems vendors across six continents from four offices in the United Kingdom, Middle East and Africa.

As a payment product and solutions expert, Stanchion seamlessly integrates well designed payments platforms and solutions that help financial services organisations to reduce the cost, complexity and risks within the payments environment.