INETCO Insider

Extracted from Loki’s Cryptex: Unlocking Transaction Complexity

#4 - Agent vs. Agentless Monitoring

For years, IT managers and application performance management teams have argued about the pros and cons of agent versus agentless monitoring software.

But when it comes to business transaction management, there is a huge benefit to agentless deployment solutions. This is especially true if you are monitoring virtual and cloud-based applications and third party network environments... (3:20 min)

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Other Videos to View from Loki’s Cryptex:

• Loki's Cryptex #3 - Monitoring Your Globe Trotting Payment Transactions with BTM (1:59 min)
• Loki's Cryptex #2 - Multi-link Muse - A Growing Dilemma in Your Banking & Payments Environment? (2:15 min)
• Loki's Cryptex #1 - AMQP will Set You Free (2:49 min)

Article written by Stacy Gorkoff, Director of Marketing at INETCO, for the May 2011 launch of Banking Security Magazine.

The look and feel of the payments industry is changing rapidly. Traditional payment authorization and settlement processes are being replaced by transactions that are more convenient for consumers, and less costly for merchants... but harder for IT teams to manage.

As mobile banking and alternative payments gain adoption, increased choices in payment options are translating into higher transaction volumes, new transaction types, and a whole new set of performance challenges that home grown solutions, traditional network monitoring tools and application performance monitoring tools running under the hood of your payments environment were not built to identify.

As a result, many key players in the payments chain, including merchants, alternative payment service providers, banks, card networks and payment processors, are left trying to figure out how to make a Ferrari out of a Dodge.

A bumpy road for the traditional payments industry

Mobile banking and other forms of alternative payments products and services have impacted all areas of the payments eco-system: the consumer, the merchant, the payment processors, acquirers, network providers and issuers. These companies have pushed the boundaries on payments innovation, and continue to gain widespread momentum all over the world, gobbling up consumer market share that was traditionally secured by the big banks, card networks and payment processors. They have added a whole new dimension to the competitive landscape, and are causing some significant "road bumps" to occur within the traditional payments industry.

Mobile subscriptions are growing faster than anticipated, being driven by three primary handheld operating systems: Blackberry, Apple iOS, and Android. According to web analyst Mary Meeker, who spoke at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last November (2010), there are 670 million 3G subscribers worldwide, and this number is growing at an average rate of 37% year over year. Each of these operating systems provides an open development platform that is fueling the rapid emergence of new, fast-paced software developers that are building payment applications specifically for mobile, such as those applications released by Firethorn, Boku, Zong and Square.

More established alternative payment software companies such as PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments continue to improve their developer tools and platforms and are actively expanding their service offerings for merchants, consumers and businesses to integrate into online websites, mobile payment applications, interactive TV, micropayments, bump technologies, Near Field Communications applications, and POS applications. Some of the more established payments companies, such as Visa, American Express and Mastercard, have also announced they are opening their payments platform to independent developers, as well.

So what does all this mean?

Two things are for sure.

1. We are experiencing an increase in transaction volumes, protocols and message formats. The volume of electronic payments is increasing, with extended services to more customers, new payment options such as mobile and NFC, and an increasing number of smart phone subscribers. The developer community that is being created by Amazon Payments, Google, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others will provide a quantity of payment applications that the payments industry has never seen before, meaning more transaction message formats and protocols to support. Undetected protocols or un-decoded transaction messages could mean risk of incorrect billing and loss of revenue for companies.
2. Payments environments are becoming more complex. Payments systems are now made up of a wider variety of "network rails", more third party networks and services, additional protocols, new or modified transaction message formats, additional security, more complex programming for terminals, and more payment applications. In many instances, a transaction encounters multiple hops along its path, significantly increasing the complexity of authorization and settlement processes. Traditional network monitoring tools and application performance monitoring tools were not built to provide end-to-end visibility into this new alternative payments environment and transaction performance.

Obtaining the Right Metrics for Driving Effective Transaction Management

To reduce risk of service disruption and manage ever-changing payments environments in an efficient manner, companies who are part of the payments chain are relying more heavily on business transaction management metrics.

IT teams that are faced with the roll-out and ongoing management of new mobile applications and alternative payment channels are deriving huge benefit from real-time business transaction management tools. These tools help them to capture in-depth transaction data, holistically monitor the performance of their payment environments, and reduce the risk of service disruptions. Business transaction management solutions provide a consolidated view of network performance data, application payload intelligence, and detailed transaction response times and completion metrics. Detailed transaction intelligence capture and multi-hop correlation and display capabilities help IT teams streamline troubleshooting processes, provide quicker problem isolation and faster inter-party dispute resolution are three of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive aspects of payment system operations.

Along with a correlated view of the entire transaction path, other transaction intelligence and key business metrics that are captured and decoded within business transaction management tools include:

• All transaction types (financial, ATM, loyalty, maintenance, polling, mobile, etc.)
• The terminal ID of the payments device or application group
• Rate of approved, declined, failed, and unsupported transactions
• Transaction response times
• Transaction reversals
• Rate of transaction closes
• Rate and duration of good/bad transactions
• Concurrent transaction volumes
• Transaction throughput
• Application delays
• Network delays

Revisiting our earlier analogy, payments systems are like cars - you have your Ferraris, you have your Dodges, and then you have everything in between. Perhaps it’s time you had another look under the hood of your payments environment. Are your transactions moving like high octane-fueled sports cars, or chugging like clunky old beaters?

Business transaction management may just be the boost you need.

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Are you Marty or Sam?

Marty and Sam are two IT operations managers working for (fictional) payment processing companies. Both rely heavily on their IT performance monitoring tools to manage complex payments environments. But that is where their similarities end... (2:49 min)

INETCO Insight 4.8 - Closing the Transaction Data Divide

By Marc Borbas, VP Marketing for INETCO

As most of you know, we take transaction data security very seriously at INETCO. In INETCO Insight, we truncate PAN numbers, we drop Track 1 and 2 information, we encrypt communications between server components. Basically, we do everything possible to make sure INETCO Insight has zero impact on your PCI compliance.

So, imagine how I reacted when a customer asked: "Could you stream the raw transaction information you collect to our database in real time?" After a few moments of stunned silence, I said "of course" and then asked "but why?"

It turns out they wanted a completely switch-independent record of every transaction they acquired, just in case, and wanted to be able to resubmit transactions if for some reason they didn't get through the switch cleanly. So with INETCO Insight 4.8, we "crossed the transaction data divide". Now, the product not only provides real-time performance metrics about transactions, but it also captures encrypted, real-time transaction information itself to be forwarded into a secure, PCI-compliant environment (important note: custom work is required to write information reliably at high volumes to an external database).

This got us thinking in a different way about the roles INETCO Insight could play in a transaction processing environment. What else could you do with a real-time raw transaction feed?

Here are a few of our other ideas; we'd also love to hear yours:

1. Feed data into a fraud or risk management system without having to rewrite your host software
2. Build up a library of real-world test data for functional or capacity testing purposes
3. Buffer transactions in high-volume or high-stakes processing situations
4. Show new customers exactly what messages they're sending and the formats they're using to speed compliance, migrations, and new service roll-outs

I should again state that INETCO Insight is just as secure as ever. This is an optional feature you can turn on, only if you are ready for it. I should also add that we are in the process of encrypting our online data store as well, just in case.

READ the INETCO Insight 4.8 and INETCO Insight 4.7 Release Notes >>

Webcast: Understanding the Technology Impact of the Durbin Amendment (Recorded April 28th, 2011)

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Discussion Paper: "Exploring the Technology Impacts of the Durbin Amendment"

We have heard a number of our customers and prospects within the US payments industry express their concerns over how the Durbin amendment will affect their existing debit processing operations. Three things are certain:

1. There will be a decrease on debit transaction revenues for issuing banks
2. There will be an increase in complexity for all debit transaction processors
3. All parties in the payments ecosystem will need to look at ways to streamline their operations and run as lean and mean as possible in order to remain competitive

How can business transaction management tools help? Read on, and find out.

DOWNLOAD this paper|PDF>>

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INETCO PRESS RELEASES

March 29, 2011 - INETCO Announces the Release of INETCO Insight 4.7

INETCO Insight transaction monitoring software extends business transaction management capabilities to NCR’s Gasper Vantage™ and APTRA™ Vision.

READ the full release >>

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May 2, 2011 - INETCO Announces the Release of INETCO Insight 4.8

Hot on the heels of the INETCO Insight 4.7 product is INETCO Insight 4.8.

In addition to enhanced alert forwarding to NCR Gasper Vantage™ and NCR APTRA™ Vision, INETCO Insight 4.8 enables the capture of complete transaction messages that can be written to a database in real-time. Tap into this robust transaction intelligence to:

• Perform deeper fraud analysis,
• Create data replication for disaster recovery, and
• Allow for more robust capacity and functionality testing

READ release notes >>

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Also watch for the launch of the INETCO Transaction Management Blog in June 2011!

"The transaction intelligence gathered by the INETCO Insight platform enriches existing ATM monitoring tools by highlighting performance information that has previously been invisible to many banking and independent ATM deployers," says Robert Johnston, Marketing Director of ATM Software at NCR. "Aligned with APTRA Vision and Gasper Vantage applications, financial institutions can gain meaningful business intelligence from their assisted- and self-service channels by combining business and operational data automatically - a correlation that previously would have had to be carried out manually."

READ the Full Press Release >>