Leading card processing company

A few years ago, the United States Census Bureau determined that there were nearly 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the U.S. A stack of all those credit cards would reach more than 70 miles into space—and be almost as tall as 13 Mount Everests.¹ More than 23 billion credit cards transactions were processed in the United States in 2007. That figure will probably be closer to 30 billion transactions by 2012.

It all bodes well for companies in the card processing industry. One leading U.S. card processing company, for example, offers reliable, safe and cost effective options for credit, debit card, electronic benefits transfer (EBT), online payment acceptance, private label credit and debit cards, gift card programs, credit card call center support and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) services, from ATM terminal driving to network support.

Partnering with nearly 170,000 merchant locations and 3,000 banks and credit unions, the company is dedicated to one goal: ensuring that it has the technology, products and expertise to help its clients grow.

However, finding the right high-volume, scalable and flexible technology solution for card processing has been a challenge for the company due to its proprietary transaction processing system. The legacy system is based on a core application engine—an in-house developed, high-speed transaction processing system utilizing the IBM mainframe platform and an assembly language. The system also provides TCP/IP socket connectivity framework support to business partners and other application systems. It uses custom ISO and proprietary Leprechaun as messaging formats.

Struggling with older technology

Even though the company is known for its performance, it lacked responsiveness and agility in selling solutions and enhancing services to its customers due to outmoded technologies in its processing system, such as proprietary message specifications, inefficient messaging formats, primitive transport, and lack of message mediations, transaction coordination, and message governance.

These inefficiencies adversely affected the company’s ability to market its solutions on time. Using the custom-defined, inefficient and inflexible message processing environment, it took a long time to integrate payment processing services with clients. Customers are used to a modern interface, which lessens their development time and works well with the tools they have. Specifically, clients of transaction processing companies today insist upon:

• Standards-based message interface and specifications
• Message transformation support
• Message mediation and flow control (choreography)
• Message transaction and coordination support
• Standards-based message security and encryption
• Messaging efficiency, scalability and availability
• Message routing
• Persistent connectivity to backend systems
• Flexible application infrastructure to accommodate growth
• Common logging and monitoring
• Simultaneous support for multiple standards

The card processing company sought to revitalize its services using next-generation, industry-standard web services, a modern intermediary infrastructure and an application solution.

Modernizing legacy system with web services interface

The company asked IBM for a solution that would keep its legacy system intact. Because of its robust performance capabilities, the company considered its legacy system a differentiator in its market, but it wanted to make the system more flexible and easier-to-integrate with its clients’ systems.

IBM proposed a solution that uses an IBM® CICS® Transaction Server-based intermediary system to interface with the legacy system and provide a high-performing web service interface and mediation framework to its partner systems. CICS Transaction Server is an advanced mainframe-based transaction processing system that is web services enabled. Developers can run full-fledged Java programs, business logic and mediation logic in it.

After initial architectural discussions with the customer team, IBM Software Services for WebSphere (ISSW) helped the company to develop the solution in CICS Transaction Server using architecture similar to service oriented architecture (SOA), but specifically designed to resolve the company’s custom transformations.

The hardware platform is IBM System z® mainframe with IBM z/OS® operating system and CICS Transaction Server 3.2 as middleware and OLTP engine to leverage the existing infrastructure. IBM DB2® 8 functions as a high-performance, scalable information management platform. IBM Java SDK 1.5 provides a development kit and runtime environment for testing and creating Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) applications. IBM Rational® Developer for System z 7.5 accelerates the development of web applications.

Scalable, high-availability solution

To preserve the legacy system and accommodate future growth, the architecture conforms to a layering approach with multiple connectivity options. There are three core layers, namely a web service connector layer, a mediation layer and a connector layer to the legacy system. The layering approach provides clear boundaries and modularity to the older system and helps separate responsibilities to ease maintenance and upgrades. A standards-based connectivity interface, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) over HTTP or SOAP over IBM WebSphere® MQ, promotes flexibility.

Most of the components, such as the mediation framework, are custom built using platform-independent Java language, as opposed to implementing products out-of-the-box, due to software and hardware budget constraints. Rules-based development reduces coding and increases business agility.

The solution is designed with high-speed in-memory processing to boost performance. To achieve this end, developers used persistent connectors and connection pooling to backend systems, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) pooling, Java class caching in the mediation engine, rules caching and making programs stay resident wherever possible.

In addition, load balancing in hardware, operating system and software promotes scalability and high availability.

Exceeding one million transactions in one month

During a recent month the card processing company exceeded one million transactions for the first time. Availability during the month was 100 percent with no incidents and no performance-related issues in handling the volume.

The IBM solution based on CICS Transaction Server enables the card processing company to shorten the time it takes to introduce new solutions and services to its clients. The solution also helps the company support multiple security, transport and performance requirements simultaneously based on different client needs.

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: ibm.com/cics

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