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Accelerating Electronic Payment Processing
A payment processing firm uses .NET and
the Web services programming model to
improve connecting to its platforms.
by Jason Salas
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Executive Summary
Company
Concord EFS Inc., a provider of electronic card transactions and payment processing services.
Project
Design a system that would provide merchants with easy access to the company's payment processing resources.
Legacy
Existing data center with in-use COM-based applications and costly telecomm links.
Solution
A Web service using three distinct interfaces—SOAP, XML, and CGI—supported by many languages and scripting platforms.
Tools
• Microsoft SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio
• Windows 2000 Advanced Server
• Oracle8i
• ActiveX Data Objects (ADO)
• COM+
• Visual Basic 6.0
• Visual C++
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
Challenges
• Aggressive time schedule for development.
• Traditional technologies relied on costly, complex, and often proprietary telecomm links.
• Legacy system had limited scalability. |
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It's a fundamental concept of marketing science: If you provide consumers with choices, they'll be more inclined to do business with you, viewing the available options as an implicit indicator of quality. Concord EFS Inc.'s mission is to provide merchants with options in advanced payment processing services, and in doing so, stay ahead of the game. As a leading provider of card transactions and payment processing, the company's success is rooted in its ability to intelligently apply technology for its network of small- to enterprise-level merchants to accelerate their business transactions. And giving developers more selection in accessing its system made it possibly the first electronic payment processor to provide open-architecture Web service access to process payments.
In November 2000, Don Schroeder, director of product development for Virtual Cyber Systems Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Concord, was tasked with conceptualizing a system that would extend and optimize the company's virtual value chain in electronic payment processing for online shopping and brick-and-mortar point-of-sale environments. He had to design a solution that would provide distinction from and competitive advantage over other payment gateways and solutions. The system also needed to be something merchant developers could tap into easily.
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| Don Schroeder and his team used .NET's open technologies to expand Concord's electronic payment system. Bottom front row from left to right: Tim Fournier, Ron Pugh, Jerome Ferland, Don Schroeder. Top back row from left to right: Gordon Grieb, Dave Stange, Francois Bergeon. |
Traditionally, payment processors such as Concord provided only closed-network access, using costly and complex technologies such as dial-up modems, frame relay, or satellite connections. Schroeder recognized that by using an open architecture he could base the app's architecture on open technologies. This would make it attractive to a wider range of developers, allowing merchants to tap into Concord's resources more easily and providing them with substantial reductions in support and development costs. This likewise would create similar economies of scale for Concord, as Schroeder noted that his team's support workload diminished dramatically.
Schroeder's team realized the Internet as a logical choice for a transport mechanism. "We thought the best solution would be to create a native gateway because most existing online merchant services' gateways are not processors, so there are inherent cost add-ons and the added difficulty of dealing with multiple entities for a payment solution," he says. "The processor is at the center of the payment system—we wanted to create a hub where transactions could be seamlessly facilitated." He decided to base development on the Web services model, taking advantage of its use of open technologies such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and XML.
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