There's effectively five things that can happen when you attempt to go for an external authorization to a transaction endpoint: 1. You can abort the Query before sending because you hit the threshold. [Our internal error APPLERR_THRESHOLD. See this 2007 post.] 2. You can find that none of the channels are connected. [APPLERR_MUXDISC] 3. Your request can time out (partner didn't respond in time). [APPLERR_QUERYHOSTTO – note that depending upon the interface and your mutual... Continue reading

I’ve spoken in many previous posts about Mux and Channel Management in the jPOS framework (search my blog for ‘channel manager’ to get a flavor of some of these pieces). In one recent situation, I might have done too good a job getting excited about how it works, most notably the ability of the mux to dynamically remove disconnected or non-reachable destinations from its pool of [nearly] round-robin candidates...and its corresponding ability to dynamically and... Continue reading

I used Balsamiq’s simple but powerful Mockups tool to build a series of screens demonstrating the capabilities of our Rx Response Simulator. You can see my short five-minute presentation here. The intent of this exercise was twofold. First, I used it as a vehicle to gather feedback and gain buy-in from our clients. The screens you see there incorporate the thoughts and ideas of six very thorough reviews by our client. Mockups are a brilliant... Continue reading

[See Part 1 here.] [See Part 2 here.] In this third and final piece, I was concerned about originating application writers not understanding that transaction result, card security code result and address verification result must be evaluated separately. So, I wrote this additional piece entitled “Transaction Response Processing Notes.” ---------------------------------- Special attention must be paid to the relationship between the three result code fields: gw_result_code; gw_avs_result_code; and gw_csc_result_code. These are separate results. The originator must... Continue reading

[See Part 1 here.] In this section of my writing, I was concerned about getting the front-end and switch models aligned. If there’s model misalignment, you’re really screwed – double-bills or non-bills are sure to follow. So, I tried to get very specific here. [Some times, I’m the king of over-explainers, but experience shows it’s necessary in this situation. Don’t take anything for granted.] ------------------------------- To make the end-to-end solution work as designed, it is... Continue reading

We recently created a Web Authorization gateway to talk to our in-place payment switch. Here’s part one of what I wrote to the writers of the customer-facing application on how to integrate... ------------------------ The OLS.Switch implementation is a host-centric model: The originator sends a purchase (‘sale’) authorization request. The originator does not send any follow-up ‘capture’ transaction. Once every 24 hours (just past midnight Eastern time), OLS extracts and formats for file-based settlement all approved,... Continue reading

I just concluded a really fun, rewarding Elance engagement in which I commissioned a project to illustrate and animate the 15-touch point-of-sale interaction that I described in this piece. You can see the results here. We'll put the results up on our home page later this week. The results are meant to be self-explanatory, so I won't belabor the point here. If you liked how this turned out, I recommend you check out my service... Continue reading

Our firm, On-Line Strategies, is going through a growth spurt, the result of hard work, attention to detail, successful projects and happy customers. We’re on the lookout for new people to join our team. We have two immediate needs: First: Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers! These positions report to Dave Bergert, OLS’ Technology and Development Director. [See Dave’s blog here.] Dave's in the process of putting together some ads that will run on key forums. But... Continue reading

We marked March 16th as The Day of Dual Milestones at our flagship acquirer-side OLS.Switch implementation. First, on the Rx adjudication side, our client turned on the spigot on NCPDP format D.0 processing. This was a seminal event. Thinking back to the impetus of the effort to creation a switch capable of handling adjudication transactions, it was the D.0 mandate that spurred the whole thing. The US Federal government (providers of Medicare and Medicaid services)... Continue reading

Related post: Part 1 --------- 2011.04.02 Update: I did a Flash presentation to accompany and illustrate this piece. See it here. --------- In sports like basketball and football - both the US and ROW (rest of the world) versions - your game is bound to improve as you increase your number of 'touches.' It's the same way with transaction processing: the more you control, the number of transactions you see, the variety of the business... Continue reading

Our flagship acquirer central switch location had a massive volume day yesterday. Since Valentine's Day fell on a Monday, we witnessed last-minute spouse/'significant other' gift buying dovetailing with the peak day of the week for pharmacy adjudication. The result: over eight million transaction requests processed in the calendar day. Here's the tale of the tape: Financial Non-PCI - 3,437,388 RX Adjudication - 3,156,978 Financial PCI - 1,484,299 --------- Total - 8,078,665 Of the Non-PCI total:... Continue reading

OLS.Switch (both the issuer and acquirer implementations) is now officially VERAFIED by Veracode. Dave Bergert and his development team worked arduously to attain this status. As explained by Veracode... The VERAFIED security marks signify that a software provider has taken appropriate steps to remove vulnerabilities in their software or to comply with respected industry standards such as the OWASP Top 10 or the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors. A VERAFIED mark and Directory... Continue reading

I've not spoken a lot in this blog about Loyalty, but the reality of the matter is that if I look at how we've spent our time over the past two to three years, it has been apportioned into approximately 40% Loyalty, 40% Pharmacy Adjudication and 20% traditional Payment Systems (which tells that maybe I need to rename my blog!) Over the past couple of years, OLS has practiced the art of on-boarding new, high-volume... Continue reading

A few weeks back we had the 'opportunity' to exploit the benefits of our multiple node payment systems deployment strategy. In general, we manage our release process very carefully. We preach and practice small, iterative releases. That approach reduces risk, both by controlling the rate of change and by not letting intertwined initiaitves pile up in the test and QA environments. Despite this diligence, there are situations that come along that force an emergency middle-of-the-day... Continue reading

I really liked this recent post by Alejandro about jPOS performance -- not just because of the gracious references to me and Ron, but because it slyly speaks to a common discussion point between me and Alejandro: the hyperinflation of TPS expectations and projections (the result of business plans that say something like "if we only get 1% of the world's volume which should be easy, then that translates to...") vs. the reality of what... Continue reading

Now that 2010 has drawn to a close, I was interested in where we sit in terms of 'transactions processed to date' at our largest acquirer-side payment switch implementation. Here's the tale of the tape: Rx: 576,259,057 [Adjudication] Financial [Non-PCI]: 395,830,634 [Mostly Loyalty] Financial [PCI]: 1,293,382,153 [Debit, Credit, ECA, SV] ------------- Total: 2,265,471,844 Even though the Financial PCI implementation has the biggest number, it's only a reflection of it being the first of our three... Continue reading

At one of our acquirer-side payment switch implementations, the terminal-generated reversal/void count is exhibiting its annual end-of-year spike: What's going on here? This phenomenon is the result of people rushing to this nation-wide retail chain looking to fully use their Flexible Spending or Health Savings Accounts ('FSA/HSA') prior to those benefits expiring at end of year. Our implementation supports partial approvals of these transactions. What's happening in these situations is: We format and send the... Continue reading

With apologies to the Double Rainbow guy, I'm more excited about Federico's Double Forward. In a previous post, I laid out when and how to forward a transaction from one jPOS TransactionManager ('TM') to another. Now, in our Pharmacy Adjudication and Local Editing implementation, we have a need for a Double Forward, i.e, one TM forwards to another, which in turn forwards to yet another. Here, I lay out the details of Federico's nice little... Continue reading

Here's an interesting problem to have: as part of the work we're doing with Market Basket Analysis ('MBA') transactions for our Loyalty Program efforts for a key client, we ran up against an interesting barrier this week. The MBAs give us the line item detail of up to 40 products being purchased at the point-of-sale. As part of our payment switch work, we act as the traffic cop and nexus point between 30,000 points-of-sale and... Continue reading

We spent some time working on our Dashboard display mechanics this week. We're aiming to craft a nice one-page display for management - TPS and financial throughput. The challenge is not to get too granular on that one page. No one wants a page they need to scroll. Management doesn't care about too much, for example, about the breakdown in EBT Cash vs. EBT Food transactions. But, they would surely appreciate a one-screen glance at... Continue reading

It was an auspicious week for us on the compliance front. After some significant work, we hit two milestone achievements... First, our payment systems switching engine was awarded the VerAfied security mark by Veracode. There's an official announcement of this achievement in the works. I'll post that when it comes out. Second, we concluded a very productive stretch of work with K3DES, our Payment Application (PA) QSA, culminating in a successful outcome of certification against... Continue reading

I'm not sure I get the wisdom of this approach: I was looking to update the photo on my Citicard (it's a circa 1991 shot of me and - 19 years on - is looking a bit dated). I searched the Citicard website looking for info on how I could upload the photo I'd selected. No such feature exists. So, I sent an e-mail to customer service asking: "How can I do this?" Silence. Or,... Continue reading

It felt like quite a bit was going on around our offices last week. Here's a short list off the top of my head: Chuck Wilke got one of our banking clients certified on the ELAN Financial Services debit processing network. [Nice work, Chuck - that's been a tough slog.] Also, Chuck shepherded another of our clients through their payment processing network Disaster Recovery exercise. At the end of the week, Chuck turned his attention... Continue reading

Related Readings: More Than Just a Payment System Life with ECA An Update on Our Rx Adjudication Project Efforts Rx Adjudication Volumes: Up, Up and Away PCI Split Virtuous Spiral (Take 1) The Virtuous Spiral and PCI Split: Final Diagrams ------------------ Time for another quick look-in at our flagship switch location. Last time I tallied up a week for review, we were nearing 32 million transactions over a seven-day stretch. Now, we're a full one-third... Continue reading

We're putting a foot firmly on the accelerator at our big Rx Adjudication implementation. [See details on the three phase rollout of this project here.] We've just put the wrap on our first working week in which every day topped the three-million transaction threshold: About the Rx Adjudication project: We're drawing on all the practices and lessons learned in our financial implementations but face some new challenges. The most prominent of those: dealing with the... Continue reading