SOA in Payments

SOA is sweeping the IT world as institutions strive to increase business agility and competitive edge. Major vendors such as IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Information Builders, Software A.G., Oracle, HP and SAP have been on the acquisition trail and are gearing up to satisfy the burgeoning market demand for SOA (and in particular, SOA using Web Services) solutions.

Yet despite this intense activity, SOA has yet to achieve serious penetration in the payments sector. The main reasons for this are concerns that an SOA/Web Services approach would have a negative impact on throughput (due to the underlying http/XML/SOAP concepts used) and due to the complexity of the payments message transformations necessary for a Web Services Adaptor to achieve integration with legacy payment systems.

With its payments integration middleware products, Alaric is uniquely positioned to overcome the above issues and thereby enable payments system integration and modernization via SOA.

Alaric’s Message Mapper product is the core message transformation engine which lies at the heart of the Authentic product range. Message Mapper enables messages to be transformed from one format to another (for example, ISO 8583 to XML and back) making Message Mapper an essential component of any payments-oriented Web Services Adaptor. The key differentiator of Message Mapper is that such transformations are configured via a point-and-click GUI rather than by programming. This makes transformations fast to configure, and easy to comprehend, with no possibility of programming errors. Message Mapper can be made available on an OEM basis to organizations wishing to create SOA/Web Services Adaptors and extend their reach into the payments market

With its ability to perform complex logic (including message routing) in addition to high performance message transformation, Authentic Gateway can itself be directly deployed as Web Services Adaptor, offering rapid, direct way of Web Services-enabling legacy payments applications.