One of the most used transactions by bank clients is payment transaction. This payment transaction must be offered to the clients on multiple channels with quality, agility, efficacy, high availability, guarantee of results.

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This calls for a well-architected system.

 

A Brazilian Bank recently implemented a Payment Rules Management System for this purpose.

 

The main objective of the system is to implement and store the business rules that must be applied on a payment authorization.

 

The system is responsible for the authorization of different types of payments made by clients on different relationship channels like ATM, Internet Banking, Call Center.

 

Most of those payments are done using a barcode input.

 

The bank relationship channels have different interface and usability characteristics.

 

An ATM Interface must have a high size of character font, reduced number of information displayed, numeric keyboard, side function buttons.

 

A Call centre ARU (Audible Response Unit) doesn´t have a visual interface, must verbalize short sentence to the user and has only a telephone keyboard for user interaction.

 

An internet banking solution that is used by a client in a desktop may use images, can display as many information as desired by the system, may offer help functions, lists of information, etc., and the client has the option to use an alphanumeric keyboard and a mouse.  

 

A bank teller system must offer an efficient interface for a user that is familiar with the system and must perform the actions repetitively and rapidly.

 

The payments have validation rules established by the companies that issue the bills.

 

The bank must guarantee that all the rules established are applied in the payment transaction authorization.

 

The system may guarantee the complete validation of the rules and may inform and ask the channel system for additional information needed for the authorization process of the payment.  

 

The system may provide information for receipts that will be presented to the client at the end of the payment transaction.

 

The way the information is asked and returned to the system channel, to be displayed to the client, must be designed in a way that could be interpreted by all the channel systems, and presented in a dynamic interface, independently of the user interface characteristics (example: web interface, character interface, audible interface, etc.).

 

The different channel interface must display/inform the same labels (defined by the business staff) of the fields to the clients (and the same type of data and domain that may be asked or showed to the client ) on the interface and the system channel do not have to make any additional implementation to include new fields on the user interface.