Explore how the Middle Eastern division of a global card network protects customers and revenue

For the Middle Eastern division of one of the largest credit card service providers in the world, delivering a flawless customer experience is a critical competitive advantage. The organization processes high-value credit and debit transactions for customers across 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and required deeper visibility into a complex payments ecosystem involving multiple third party telecommunications, POS, ATM and back-end service providers. Because customer experience is paramount, even a one-second improvement in transaction speed could translate into significant returns.

To support growing transaction volumes without indroducing lag or downtime, the global card network implemented an active/active architecture capable of dynamically routing transactions across multiple Postilion servers based on real-time transaction load.

However, the increased complexity of this architecture introduced several operational challenges including:

• Lack of end-to-end visibility across the complete consumer transaction journey
• Inconsistent compliance with network and service-level regulations requiring authorization completion within six-seconds
• Difficulty identifying the root cause of transaction issues: whether originating from the payments switch, card management system, internal network, telecommunications provider or one of the 50+ third party ATM, POS, and back-end service providers

When issues did arise, resolving them required multiple operational, application and support teams to manually analyze extensive network logs. These logs were complex to navigate and difficult to interpret, often slowing investigations and increasing mean time to repair (MTTR) while consuming significant operational resources.

INETCO provides end-to-end visibility into every payment, delivering real-time insight into transaction performance across multiple applications, systems and third party networks. With a holistic view of the payments environment, the transaction services team can quickly identify when and where issues arise – often before they escalate into service-impacting failures.

Prior to INETCO Insight, troubleshooting was a reactive and time-consuming process. Teams had to manually pull and analyze transaction logs from each Postilion server to determine where an issue occurred, a process that could take days or even weeks.

INETCO Insight now provides the transaction intelligence required to isolate whether slowdowns or failures are due to the internal network, applications or other third party service providers. As a result, the organization sped up average mean-time-to-repair by 65%.

“Now rather than five people getting a phone call at 3am to let them know something isn’t working, when I arrive in the morning one of my operators is able to tell me that there was a problem and that they were able to take care of it on their own. Through the improved service delivery, faster problem isolation and reductions in failed revenue-generating transactions, we achieved a full return on our INETCO investment within four months.”

TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGER, GLOBAL CARD NETWORK

Within the first six weeks of deployment, the global card network isolated transaction bottlenecks that had previously been plaguing the company for three years, but could not be identified using legacy monitoring and tracing tools. The organization now has one-stop visibility across every payment journey – moving through two data centers, a third-party telecom, and 54 other ATM, POS and back-end service providers.

The organization not only met its goal of reducing transaction authorization times from six seconds to five, but exceeded it – achieving average authorization times of four seconds, a 33% improvement.

With INETCO Insight, the company no longer needed to manually analyze massive sets of network logs to diagnose issues. Instead, teams could quickly identify and resolve network slowdowns, time-outs and unexplained transaction failures with clear, real-time transaction visibility – all in one centralized dashboard.

Key improvements in service delivery, productivity, and operational efficiency include:

• 75% reduction in transaction time-outs occurring within internal network components
• Network availability gains from 99.92% to 99.96% – recovering 50% of previously lost customer transactions and high-spend revenue
• 33% reduction in transaction authorization times (from 6 seconds to 4 seconds)
• 65% reduction in mean-time-to-repair through streamlined troubleshooting and “engineering out” small issues to avoid system-wide problems
• Automated real-time alerts that notify teams of:
  • Lack of telco, third-party service or acquirer activity
  • Data line outages
  • Slow segment flows
  • Low application response rates (Postilion, HSM, card management)