Strategic payments services maintains customer service level goals

SPS is Australia’s fastest growing electronic payment solutions provider. The company’s stated aim is to deliver “best-in-class payment processing solutions and services that are focused on reliability, robustness, superior quality, lower cost, maximum flexibility and innovation.”

These services include comprehensive, secure and reliable transaction processing and switching for retail merchants, and fast, cost-effective device driving and transaction management for ATM and EFTPOS terminals.

SPS lacks transaction level switch environment visibility

SPS operates a Postilion switch environment which routes transactions from downstream clients including ATMs and EFTPOS terminals to upstream clients and partners.

While SPS was originally using a systems management platform to monitor the overall health and performance of their switch, it did not generate visibility of their switch environment at the transaction level. The absence of this transaction-level insight crippled the ability of SPS to deliver on one of their key points of difference: improvements in customer service by raising the bar on availability, reliability and scalability.

Proactively identifying the root cause of transaction errors is a crucial component of this goal. Their support staff was unable to pinpoint transaction errors because the system was incapable of monitoring individual transaction data in real time.

Because of this shortcoming in their current management system, any underlying issues could affect multiple customers before they were able to be rectified.

Prognosis real time provides critical insight

SPS decided to implement Prognosis Realtime Framework Manager, a solution specifically designed to deliver real-time access to detailed financial transaction information with a depth of metrics and flexibility that other management tools are unable to provide.

From an operational standpoint this means that SPS is able to monitor system metrics including disk utilization, memory usage and transactions per second, and combine them on a single dashboard display with real-time root-cause analysis of transaction failures.

In addition to the overall health of the switch, SPS uses Prognosis to monitor key ISO8583 fields and sub-fields such as BIN numbers, device name, location information, transaction amount, and acquirer, issuer and response code.

SPS implemented SNMP traps using Prognosis to create a comprehensive set of customizable thresholds, based on Postilion monitoring recommendations, not only to alert staff to service-level breaches, but also to notify them when these limits are being approached so that preventative action can be taken.

Solution delivers proactive troubleshooting ability

Perhaps the most beneficial outcome for SPS has been the ability to monitor transactions for individual source and sink nodes.

The transaction-level visibility that Prognosis provides combined with the ability to monitor response codes for specific clients, both upstream and downstream, allows SPS to pinpoint and isolate issues quickly. This ensures that troubleshooting resources are directed where they’re needed.

SPS is now able to shift from being so reactive in their approach to switch management, and offer a proactive service for their customers.