Bankalararası Kart Merkezi — Interbank Card Center (BKM) is a centralized card payments processor for all of the issuing and acquiring institutions in Turkey. Established in 1990 as the national Switch for Turkey, the Company provides strategic card payment systems and services for its 33 Members throughout the country, helping to oversee the development of rules and standards for domestic credit, debit and prepaid cards. BKM currently validates and clears close to 10 million transactions per day, routing through a number of different payment gateways.
Challenges
BKM remains strongly committed to providing the best service level delivery possible to its domestic institution members, the retail industry and their cardholders. But more digital channels and payment gateways, new customer demands, and an average 10-15% increase in transaction volumes per year meant that BKM needed to significantly change the way they managed and responded to performance issues within their service environments
While BKM had the ability to partially monitor internal Switch application messages from database log tables, it was challenging to easily analyze these in relation to the external formats of transaction messages. Knowing that undetected transaction failures and slowdowns have a negative impact on both BKM’s service level delivery as well as their member institutions’ end customers, BKM turned their focus on establishing end-to-end visibility into the lifecycle of every transaction.
The Solution
BKM chose the INETCO Insight® real-time transaction monitoring and data streaming solution for collecting, correlating and decoding all message data fields in every end-to-end transaction.
INETCO Insight gives BKM the power to investigate issues, transaction by transaction. The Company can now securely monitor all transaction message data details, TCP acknowledgments, TCP connect/disconnects, and the data element conversions between different formats and message flows — in one centralized view. This is being done utilizing a light weight method that involves mirroring network traffic through a SPAN port.
Results
INETCO Insight is now BKM’s underlying, essential customer experience management tool that makes sure all transactions are running smoothly and seamlessly, without customer disruptions.
BKM’s test and certifications group uses INETCO Insight to see the entire end-to-end transaction data elements during testing. The operations team use INETCO Insight for rule-based notifications of transaction performance issues and faster investigation into member complaints. Benefits include:
- Guaranteeing the Best Customer Experience Possible
- Providing Exceptional Service Level Delivery for Member Institutions
- Reducing Operational and Support Costs
Future
BKM is currently using an active-active, load balancing infrastructure in one data center. In the near future, BKM plans to upgrade their Switch environment to Dual Site, supported with an active-active, load balancing infrastructure on each site.
INETCO Insight will be used to monitor transactions processed in the two data centers and application servers, helping to reduce the risk of data center failures and to obtain even higher availability. BKM plans to deepen the current use of INETCO Insight by expanding real-time alerts to include scenarios such as:
- A sudden decrease or increase in acquirer or issuer traffic
- Consecutive declines with the same response codes
- Erroneous messages which cannot be parsed by INETCO Insight
There are also plans for deeper transaction analytics to improve reporting of customer card usage for its domestic members, such as:
- Number of transactions per issuer and per acquirer
- Number of transactions processed by the Switch
- Number of stand in transactions
- Average time to completion per transaction
- Value of transactions by card type