Australia's St George Bank is piloting a transaction server to
boost the processing capacity of its online card transaction
operations.
According to Rex Selwood, St George project manager for the bank's
Internet Payment Gateway project, the bank was pressured by the
need to replace its existing e-payment infrastructure because it
would not scale for future business growth.
The bank's previous transaction processing system was based on a
distributed solution that required software and hardware at
merchants' locations.
The shortfall was that as business grew, it reached the stage where
is could not manage any further growth, according to St George
Bank's chief manager for electronic solutions Martin Eltoft. In the
long term it was too costly to continue using several third-party
solution providers because of mismatching and sometimes overlapping
skill sets.
The bank needed a centralised solution - one that would enable it
to "push and grow" its e-commerce business further - a major
business imperative as its online commerce functions covered the
processing of credit card payments by consumers and businesses
trading goods and services over the Web, as well as call centre or
interactive voice response systems.
For the past few months St George has been trialling a Webpay
Transaction Server by Australian provider of financial transaction
processing solutions eFunds, to increase the processing capability
for electronic and online transactions. The bank was unwilling to
disclose its investment in the pilot.
Selwood, now an independent consultant, said the server is an
alternative to the bank's existing online card verification payment
solution under which member merchants or partners needed to pay for
a special terminal and bank communication lines to verify card
transactions.
Migrating to the transaction server has also let the bank
centralise the upgrade function of its processing software to one
location, thus reducing the software distribution nightmare.
"Card providers periodically make changes to their systems which
previously required software upgrades to all on-site merchant
terminals, [but] the Webpay solution has eliminated that problem as
its systems are in-house at the bank," Eltoft said.
And improving internal and customer productivity as well as
reducing administrative costs, the solution has a merchant
administration console enabling merchants to log onto the bank's
site and get real-time reports on processed transactions or make
refunds, leaving administrative control in their hands.
The main challenge of the project was that it required the bank's
IT group to change its "plug and play" approach to implementing to
a more collaborative, training-intensive style of project
management, Selwood said.