Article
ATM transaction visibility: It's worth a look
A technical infrastructure manager describes how end-to-end transaction monitoring helped his team pinpoint network issues that were costing the company money.
April 2, 2015 by Suzanne Cluckey — Owner, Suzanne Cluckey Communications
Paul Grieve will tell you that a picture is definitely worth a thousand words. In fact, he might even tell you that a thousand is on the low side.
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As technical infrastructure manager overseeing North Africa and the Middle East for a global payment services provider, he has endured the frustration of trying to resolve an "invisible" network issue that might involve any one of 54 external partners in one of 14 countries, speaking one of 10 different languages.
In any language, it can be difficult to persuade one of these partners that a hitch in the transaction process lies within their systems. It's a lot easier to send visual evidence of the problem than it is "trying to have somebody translating from English or Arabic to French to whatever ... So, very important to us was to have this graphical representation of what is happening," Grieves said during the webinar, "The ROI of Transaction Visibility — A Case Study," presented by Inetco and hosted by ATM Marketplace.
The "graphical representation" Grieve alludes to is provided by Inetco Insight, a network-based, real-time transaction monitoring software platform for banking and payment processing environments. Insight makes use of an always-on data source — consumer transactions, said Marc Borbas, vice president of product marketing at INETCO Systems Ltd.
"Each transaction that travels across your ATM, POS, branch, mobile banking or Internet banking environments contains useful information on what the customer is experiencing, how networks and applications are responding and what the business value of each transaction is from a revenue or service perspective," Borbas said.
Insight collects and compiles end-to-end transaction data from each of these sources and assembles it according to any number of selected parameters — reporting, alerting, diagnostic and analytical — which the program can present in a variety of dashboard-viewable formats — including graphs.
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Operations and support teams and external partners can use these reports to identify issues with network performance — transaction timeouts and delays, for instance — and pinpoint their source so that they can be addressed in a timely, methodical way.
Managers and data analysts can use transaction information from Insight to develop more effective strategies to better serve existing customers — and attract new ones, Borbas said. The data also can illustrate ATM use patterns, helping to determine optimum device placement, for instance, or identify events that might indicate potential fraud, allowing the operator to stop fraudsters in real time.
In Grieve's case, Inetco Insight was employed with the primary intention of monitoring and analyzing transaction volumes across an increasingly complex and increasingly busy network.
The company had implemented Postilion active/active architecture with multiple data centers that could route a transaction through different Postilion servers based on transaction volumes experienced at any given time.
However, Grieve and his team soon found that legacy monitoring tools simply could not provide the visibility needed to ensure that the company was meeting network and service level regulations for six-second authorization completion times.
"My IT infrastructure team also had limited insight into the root-cause of transaction problems within the enterprise environment and whether or not an issue was with our payment switch, card management system, internal network, telecom provider, or one of the 54 third-party service providers we rely upon," he said. "Finally, when problems did occur, finding a solution required multiple operational, application and support team silos to go through expansive network logs that were complex to navigate and difficult to analyze. This adversely affected mean time to repair and required a large expenditure of resources."
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Grieve said that using Insight had allowed the company to realize a 65 percent improvement in mean transaction time, assign ownership to issues, achieve a 75 percent reduction in timeouts within internal network components and reduce transaction authorization times by one-third. And, Grieves said, "[W]e achieved a full return on our INETCO Insight investment within four months."
Borbas took the webinar audience through a live, on-screen demo of Inetco Insight dashboards, including a "visual map" of a transaction that revealed the precise point and cause of a failed transaction — in this case a request for an ATM withdrawal of $420.
"This core switch waited 60 seconds for a response from the authorization host, didn't get it, assumed there was a timeout and tried to recover gracefully," Borbas said. "But its graceful recovery was actually to decline the transaction because $420 was over a threshold at which that switch was able to stand in.
"So you can see how these problems can cascade their way down to a disappointed customer as the result of a technical failure deeper in the transaction chain. And Insight allows you to really quickly get to the heart of those types of issues."
The complete one-hour webinar, with demo, sample dashboard screens from Grieves' operation, and a Q&A session is now available for online replay.
About Suzanne Cluckey
Suzanne’s editorial career has spanned three decades and encompassed all B2B and B2C communications formats. Her award-winning work has appeared in trade and consumer media in the United States and internationally.
