Open Solutions Inc., now a Fiserv company, operates one of the largest ATM and POS payment switches in Canada. By providing cash transaction processing, POS/ATM monitoring, and 7/24 support, they are responsible for more than 150 million transactions annually. Their clients include some of the largest banks, credit unions, insurance providers, retailers and wealth management companies in the world.
Challenges
The Open Solutions Canada Banking Solutions Group has a strong business reputation based on the reliability of their customer’s Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) interfaces including ATMs, POS terminals, IVR systems, Internet banking, third party bill payments, loans origination services and credit authorizations.
As service offerings expand, there is a growing requirement to track financial transactions from beginning to end, so that any service problems or potential cost-saving efficiencies could be proactively detected. Financial transaction quality needed to be monitored in a passive way that required little service disruption for their customers and did not add to the complexity of their growing IT infrastructure.
Solution – Monitoring 8 EFT Channels
INETCO Insight’s business transaction management functionality and deployment architecture were a perfect fit for Open Solutions Canada’s data center and network operations center (NOC). Any variance from the expected transaction activity norm triggers real-time alerts that are fed into Open Solutions Canada’s monitoring, alarm, escalation, and trouble ticketing systems for immediate investigation. The NOC can proactively monitor applications and service offerings at the transaction level on a 24×7 basis, and quickly identify a problem’s origin, its scope and business impact.
INETCO Insight monitors the network traffic rather than the host processes, allowing Open Solutions Canada to install the product on multiple banking systems with no impact to any existing host, server platform or application. Expansive libraries of modular transaction decode tables make it easy for Open Solutions Canada to monitor all of their TCP/IP-based and XML-based financial transaction types with minimal customization required.
Currently, INETCO Insight is being used to monitor eight unique EFT channels for Open Solutions Canada. Service level targets are being set on business transaction execution rather than server availability, CPU (central processing unit) levels, or synthetic monitors.
Results
INETCO Insight has helped Open Solutions Canada:
- Achieve 100% ROI in less than 12 months
- Automate resource-intensive data gathering processes and decrease the support costs associated with application downtime and third party service issues
- Add new services and monitor financial transactions in a passive way, without incurring risk of service disruption and without touching the switch
- Easily extend transaction monitoring to include new financial transaction message types and EFT network protocols
- Optimize transaction routing across an increasingly complex payments network