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SmartVista Processing Solution Overview
Just like any card processing solution, SmartVista will operate in an environment where it will exchange information with other systems, networks, devices and people to ensure that plastic card holders may use this instrument to pay for their purchases, and merchants can receive payment for the goods and services that they sell to the cardholders.

The main categories of external participants in this interchange are:
  • the bank's core Banking System that maintains all information about the bank's business with the customer, processes transactions that are not related to plastic cards and performs consolidated account maintenance and settlement functions.
  • Local or international payments organisations, or Card Schemes, such as Visa, Europay/MasterCard, American Express, etc. who act as facilitators in the clearing of card payments.
  • Points of Interaction (POI's). These include merchants' electronic Point-of-Sale (POS, or EPOS) terminals, off-line voice authorisation points for manual transactions, and Web-based Internet service points. The bank will also provide POI's to their customers, including Automatic Teller Machines (ATM's), Internet Banking interfaces and attended over-the-counter service points where cardholders can make cash withdrawals and other transactions.
  • Cardholders, i.e. individuals entitled to use properly issued plastic cards as a payment instrument, whether their cards have been issued by this bank or by any other member of the Card Scheme.
Some of these interactions are performed in real time, such as authorisation requests/responses, and some through a regular, typically daily, exchange of files composed of messages in agreed formats, such as Europay ECCF or Visa Base II clearing files.

This has determined the logical split between the SmartVista Front-End as a system dealing primarily with on-line real-time interactions, and the SmartVista Back-Office as the one responsible for batch interchanges with both Card Schemes and the Banking System and for long-term maintenance of customer information related to their cards and card transactions.

This also means that the SmartVista Front-End deals first and foremost with authorisations, while all financial messages are the responsibility of the SmartVista Back-Office. The only exceptions are Single Message System (SMS) transactions that are processed on-line without prior authorisation. For these purposes, the SmartVista Front-End has some exception processing features built in to support the SMS clearing cycle.

Therefore, the main interfaces required for the operation of the SmartVista Processing solution are:

  • On-Line Network Interface (between the SmartVista Front-End and the Card Scheme network)
  • Device interfaces (on-line, between the SmartVista Front-End and the various POI devices)
  • Host Interface (on-line, between the SmartVista Front-End and the Host Processor, if any, see explanations in the Issuer Processing section below)
  • Front-End/Back-Office Interface (off-line)
  • Off-Line Network Interface (between the SmartVista Back-Office and the Card Scheme network, usually via a Card Network terminal)
  • Banking System Interface (off-line, between the SmartVista Back-Office and the Core Banking System)
The basic idea of information flows that the two SmartVista Processing components have to deal with on a daily basis is given in the following subsections of this section.

Another important principle underlying the design of the SmartVista Processing solution is to keep information under control, so care has been taken to ensure that there is always a secure and auditable procedure to enter any new data or to change the existing information. Different approaches are used for different types of data:

The most sensitive 'static' customer related information, such as new customers, cards or accounts, may only be entered in the form of an electronic document called Customer Application, that will have to pass a validation and approval process before the actual customer, card, account, etc. entries are added to the database.

The take-on and update of other types of static information that relate to the processing environment and product definitions is done by authorised users via the SmartVista Graphical User Interface (GUI), with a proper access control. 'Dynamic' changes can be made to the existing customer related data as required in a processing or customer service situation, such as card/account status change, address change, etc. SmartVista GUI includes forms that allow authorised users to make such changes from their workstations, with an auditable transaction-style mechanism behind to apply these changes across the system.



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