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Solution Overview
The Oracle Faster
Payments Gateway
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SOLUTION OVERVIEW
The Faster Payments initiative presents banks with a challenging
timetable for the introduction of a mandatory new service that is
probably revenue neutral. As such, banks need to look for a low-
risk, cost-effective solution to meet the business and technical
requirements of Faster Payments, and ensure compliance with the
testing and implementation timescales.
The Faster Payments Gateway (or the Gateway) meets these
requirements. The Gateway is built around a real-time messaging
engine that provides banks with access to the Faster Payments
Network using the ISO8583 messaging protocol. The construction
and validation of messages in line with this messaging protocol is
complex and demands features such as accurate timing of
responses, automatic initiation of reversals, duplicate detection
and guaranteed delivery. The need to respond in real-time,
coupled with volumes of up to hundreds of transactions per
second, make this an extremely demanding interface for the banks
to develop, test and certify.
The Gateway provides this interface out of the box. This helps to
speed up the bank’s deployment, and reduces the project risk. The
Gateway meets all compliance needs for participants in the Faster
Payments Scheme and supports step-by-step migration to the
Faster Payments Service.
The Gateway offers high availability and performance without
requiring expensive or proprietary hardware. The state-of-the-art
architecture is future-proof, allowing the system to be extended to
meet future requirements at significantly less cost when compared
to proprietary, legacy platforms.
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BENEFITS
There are a number of benefits brought by the Gateway. As part
of the Joint Venture providing the Faster Payments Central
Infrastructure (CI), VocaLink can ensure that this and future
versions of the Gateway can not only connect to the central
network, but also adhere to any compliance requirements, scheme
rules & standards that the scheme operator impose.
The technology used within the solution is already widely
deployed within banks, and as such no new skills will be required
to operate the Faster Payments Gateway. The solution also allows
immediate detailed analysis of the payments passing through the
Gateway in ‘near’ real-time. This business intelligence will allow
banks to monitor the status of the Faster Payment network and its
own exposures and liquidity to the payment network. Full
visibility of incoming payment traffic by submitting institution is
also visible.
The solution provides an out-of-the-box gateway that is both
highly available and scalable using commodity hardware. The
latest technology allows the solution to achieve maximum
availability and ‘near’ linear scalability without the dependence on
high-end and high-cost hardware platforms.
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SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 – The Gateway Solution Architecture
The same technology platform (i.e., Oracle Database 10g and
Oracle Application Server 10g) can be used for other payment
gateway applications that the bank may need to support. For
example additional solutions that could reside on the some
technology platform could be a replacement for the current HST
connectivity to VocaLink (ETS) and Swift gateways. These
solutions would use the same technology stack and benefit from
the same user security and BI tools that underpin the Faster
Payments Gateway.
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The benefits to the banks of this approach include the following:
• The costs of supporting and maintaining the “gateway
platform” are reduced;
• The gateways are pre-integrated and certified on this
technology platform; and
• It means that the integration of these multiple payment
systems is a one-time project for these gateways and any
additional gateways that are supported on this technology
platform.
Figure 2 – Re-use of the Technology Platform
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BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL OBJECTIVES
The overall business objectives for the Faster Payments Gateway
are to:
• Provide banks with a cost-effective way of reaching full
compliance with the Faster Payments Scheme in the
required timeframe;
• Allow banks to offer Faster Payments access to their
agency and corporate customers; and
• Provide a platform for future payment Scheme
connectivity (e.g. SEPA).
• Allow banks to analyze ‘near’ real-time payment
information for any purpose, including marketing,
liquidity management and sales information
The overall technical objectives for the Gateway are to:
• Provide equivalent levels of resilience and availability to
traditional non-stop architectures;
• Ensure scalability and support growing volumes in line
with throughput and SLA requirements of Faster
Payments;
• Enable straightforward integration with back office
systems;
• Facilitate the cost-effective implementation of business
enhancements and bespoke additions; and
• Maximise configurability for ease of installation and
maintenance.
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TARGET ARCHITECTURE
Oracle has been a key technology partner to the Financial Services
Industry for many years, with Oracle technology being deployed
to underpin some of the Industries most critical systems. Oracle’s
understanding of a bank’s architecture and landscape, both
existing and future, enables us to clearly show how the Gateway
can be deployed within a bank.
In the diagram below, the possible deployment of the Faster
Payment Gateway solution within potential target architectures is
highlighted.
Figure 3 – Target Architecture
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SUMMARY OF KEY FEATURES
The Gateway offers the following key features:
• Access to the Faster Payments Network using the ISO8583
interface to send and receive payments;
• Access to the Faster Payments Network for agency banks
and corporate customers;
• Logging of all messages sent and received;
• Validation against Faster Payments Scheme rules;
• Routing of inbound messages to relevant accounts system;
• Transmission of payment files (Standing Orders) as single
payments;
• Automatic reconciliation with the Faster Payments
Network;
• Stand in processing for Agency Banks;
• Stand in authorisation for receiving faster payments when
account systems are offline;
• Integration with existing back office systems, such as:
o Cash Management Systems:
o Transaction Management and Exception Handling
Systems;
o AML and Fraud Control Systems;
o Management Information and Reporting Systems;
o Enterprise Monitoring Systems;
• Minimisation of changes to the bank’s existing systems;
• Near ‘real-time’ business intelligence & analytics;
• Security that meets the requirements of the Faster
Payments Scheme;
• User management and access control;
• Scalability and extensibility; High availability and
performance on commodity hardware.
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CONTACT DETAILS
For Further Information on Oracle Financial Services see
http://www.oracle.com/industries/financial_services/index.html
Or alternately contact:
North America Pete.Winner@Oracle.com
Europe, Middle East and Africa Nicola.Toombs@oracle.com
Latin America luis-arturo.diaz@oracle.com
Asia/Pacific tara.k.dutt@oracle.com
