When the bank acts as an Issuer, it provides payment services to its Issuer Customers, i.e. people and organisations who hold plastic cards issued by this bank. The customers may use their card to pay for a product or service, or to withdraw cash, at any device or service point connected to any of the Card Scheme member banks acting as an Acquirer. Any transaction starts with an authorisation request sent from the service point and passed on by the Acquirer via the Card Scheme to the cardholder's Issuer, to check the cardholder's ability to pay and hold the required amount on their account with the Issuer until the final settlement occurs. The authorisation request is followed up by a presentment, which is a financial message that urges the Issuer to transfer the requested amount. The only types of transactions that do not require authorisation are those where the amount is below the floor limit (in this case the Issuer agrees to guarantee the payment in any event), including manual transactions (entered off-line by taking a card imprint and getting the cardholder to sign a slip, or voucher) and Single Message System (SMS) transactions (where the authorisation request is treated as a financial message).

The SmartVista Front-End is continuously available for authorisation processing. It receives authorisation requests from the Card Schemes via the On-Line Network Interface, and, if in stand-in authorisation mode, checks the requested amount with the balance available on the card account that it holds in its database. If the balance allows, the authorisation is granted, the amount is subtracted from the available balance and an authorisation message is generated for the Posting File.

When in On-Line (or Host) authorisation mode, the Front-End will route the request to the system responsible for on-line authorisation processing, known as a Host Processor, and will need to receive its response before the authorisation can take place. For example, this may be a function of the core Banking System, to make sure that authorisations are always based on up-to-the-minute information about cardholder account balances. The on-line interface used for this type of communication is called the Host Interface.

Typically once a day (although it can be done more frequently), the SmartVista Front-End sends the Posting File to the SmartVista Back-Office via the Front-End/ Back-Office Interface, so that the authorisations can later be matched with the corresponding financial messages that will follow. The Posting File will also contain all financial and non-financial messages resulting from these authorisations.

To complete the two-way synchronisation over the Front-End/ Back-Office Interface, two other types of batch files are regularly sent in the opposite direction: from the SmartVista Back-Office to the SmartVista Front-End: the Daily Balance File that brings to date the available balances and the Card Reference File that adds any changes to customer, card and account information.

Because the SmartVista Front-End holds all information it its real-time relational database, these updates do not interrupt routine authorisation processing: they just populate the relevant database fields while they are not used for transaction processing.

For the SmartVista Back-Office, on the contrary, all communication with other systems, from Card Schemes to the Banking System, happens through the exchange of files. This, of course, does not apply to its users, such as operators, account officers, dispute officers and administrators. Any changes that they enter via the SmartVista Graphical User Interface will apply immediately but will not go beyond the Back-Office database.

As part of daily interchange with Card Schemes through the Off-Line Network Interface, the SmartVista Back-Office receives Incoming Clearing Files that contain presentments and other financial messages allowed in the clearing cycle. These messages are matched with the authorisations received from the Front-End, and if no problems arise, the transactions are written off to customer accounts and the relevant postings are generated and sent to the Banking System as part of the Outgoing Banking System Interface File.

If some of the incoming presentments are not acknowledged by the cardholder or cannot be validated against the Issuer database, a dispute resolution process is started following the rules set out by the Card Scheme. It involves an exchange of financial and non-financial dispute messages, such as chargebacks, retrieval requests, representments, reversals, etc. SmartVista Back-Office simplifies the dispute officer's work by keeping track of all the disputes on the system and by providing maximum automation in generating these messages. The dispute messages are transmitted to the Card Scheme as part of Outgoing Clearing Files. Once the dispute is resolved, whether to the bank and customer advantage or at a loss to either the customer or the bank, the dispute amount is written off to either the customer account or the bank's profit and loss, and the resulting postings are sent through the Outgoing Banking System Interface.

Any updates to customer account balances that originate outside the SmartVista, i.e., a deposit or withdrawal that the customer made in a branch without using their card, or a payment order that arrived via S.W.I.F.T., will be communicated to the SmartVista Back-Office as entries in the Incoming Banking System Interface File.

The Off-Line Network Interface is also used to receive other types of information from the Card Schemes, such as updated country and currency codes, BIN tables, hot card lists, etc., and to send back all kinds of mandatory reports.