Visa's new platform adds value to clients and company

It has taken a six-year build, a €500m investment and the creation of an entire IT department to realise, but Visa Europe has finally completed the migration to its new inter-bank processing service.

The payments technology firm moved the last of its members over to the service's recently completed clearing and settlement system in September, having finished the transfer of its banking customers to a new authorisation platform in 2009.

Steve Chambers, Visa Europe's CIO, brought the project to a successful conclusion, but providing Visa Europe's member banks with a dedicated European processing system was no minor undertaking and began almost a decade ago.

Queue jumping

Visa Europe's processing was originally performed through its international parent firm's global platform. However, the limitations of this approach had started to become apparent, says Mr Chambers. European requirements for changes to the platform - such as new products and services - had to compete with those of other regions, and because the US market was the biggest section of Visa's business, it tended to take priority. "Europe had to take its place in the queue," says Mr Chambers. "So we couldn't respond as quickly to the demands in the European payments space."

As a result, in 2000, Visa International decided to create an alternative platform for the European market. An initial investigation into the project started a year later, and by the time Mr Chambers joined the company in 2005, development was well under way.

While the project was in motion, Visa Europe did not have an IT department beyond some frontline operations. As a result, Mr Chambers's first task was to establish project management and development capability, so that Visa Europe could take the system on. "It was at least as challenging to build the capability to run the platform and the IT organisation as it was to build the platform itself," he says.

In the meantime, project requirements were constantly shifting. "It was one of those challenging projects where you have a moving target," says Mr Chambers. "Visa's global platform had evolved over 25 years, so it wasn't formerly documented anywhere and we couldn't just pull something off the shelf with the requirements of the system we had to build." He adds that things were further complicated by Visa's biannual, customer-wide system updates.

Key objectives

When it came to building the system itself, the main aims - and architectural challenges - were resilience and performance, Mr Chambers says. Visa International's global system had been based on standard mainframe systems, but for the new platform, Visa Europe opted for a distributed approach. The finished system runs from two, constantly live, parallel, datacentres covering 929 square metres of estate. All transactions are processed and trafficked by both sites at all points in time, so if there is a major disaster and one of the datacentres goes down, then operations can continue from the other as if nothing had happened. "We've built an open systems platform. Any site or part of a site can fail and we can continue to process without interruption, without even a blip," says Mr Chambers.

Ensuring that messages between datacentres and other parties involved in a card transaction were suitably speedy was crucial to this approach, because a request might be routed to one datacentre, then back to an issuer, while the subsequent issuer response might be directed to the other. "The latency between them had to be very low, as did service at the point of delivery from merchant to consumer - which is the only place it really counts," says Mr Chambers. He adds that the platform has the capacity to handle 2500 transactions per second and switches transactions at an average of 20 milliseconds.

The ability to operate from just one datacentre is often employed, both as a contingency planning exercise, but also when delivering new services to the market, where one site can be taken offline while upgrades - such as a recently implemented real-time fraud scoring system - are made, and the then switched on with new services in place while the process is repeated with the other. "We spent an awful lot of time and money putting this system in place," says Mr Chambers. "Now that it is, my mission is to exploit its value as much as possible."