Payment Processing Case Study: How Solutran® Deploys a New Electronic Payment Processing Platform

Solutran provides electronic payment processing services for government and private sector programs in the USA. With a new proprietary, best-in-class Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) platform, the Company easily caters to all their clients’ unique processing needs and specifications, supporting nation-wide programs such as:

  • SPIN® (Solutran POS & Imaging Network)
  • SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)
  • WIC (Women with Infant Children)
  • Healthy Savings®

Challenges

When asked to create an electronic payment processing platform to support the US government’s SNAP and eWIC programs, Solutran knew they needed to build a scalable, reliable system infrastructure that American families could depend upon to keep nutritious food on their tables. Solutran’s S3™ Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) platform and active/active data architecture was designed to make the processing and routing of SNAP and eWIC transactions seamless, 24/7.

Although the electronic payment processing system architecture was very robust, the added complexity presented new challenges when it came to having the end-to-end visibility needed to quickly isolate issues affecting the completion of transactions. Solutran knew that real-time monitoring of the entire transaction path, from initiation endpoint to authorization, would be essential. With real life consequences to transaction slowdowns, bottlenecks, or failures, they needed a dependable solution that would also scale with their US state by state deployments.

Solution

Trusted financial solutions provider SoliSystems recommended INETCO Insight® to monitor end-to-end transactions in real-time, helping Solutran to eliminate operational “blind spots” and guarantee that SNAP and eWIC users have minimal service disruptions.

Results

With INETCO Insight, Solutran has reduced the negative service impacts associated with downtime and transaction completion lags. Specific product benefits include:

Guaranteeing undisrupted service delivery to SNAP and eWIC program end users

  • Proactive intervention in cases that may result in transaction failures or slowdowns
  • Safer program roll outs to new US states
  • Complete end-to-end performance visibility of the S3™ EBT processing system and active-active data centers

Obtaining an end-to-end view of their electronic payment processing network

  • Monitoring the performance of their new EBT platform before, during and after roll-out
  • Quickly isolate network, application or transaction delays in an active/active system architecture, helping to expedite problem isolation and routing errors
  • Correlate transactions across multiple hops for a true end-to-end performance view

Reducing risk of fraudulent behavior

  • Identify when undelivered or incomplete transactions take place
  • Immediate notification of stand-in mode and the waiving of program-specific purchase restrictions
  • Faster identification of anomalies such as high velocity card usage, multiple cards used at the same endpoint, and higher than normal purchase volumes

Future Plans

Solutran plans to expand the use of INETCO Insight across all of their electronic payment processing platforms in those US states using SNAP or eWIC. States that will be utilizing INETCO Insight with their Solutran-run SNAP and eWIC programs include: Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, and the US Virgin Islands.

Learn more about INETCO’s EBT fraud prevention solution.