The Payment Gateway Platform (Telesens PGW) is a custom-designed payment platform for mobile operators. It is a convenient and efficient tool for receiving payments from subscribers for mobile services. The payment gateway solution is one of the many business support solutions available in the Telesens portfolio.
About Payment Gateway system
The main users of the Payment Gateway system functionality are mobile operators, as well as networks of partners of these operators, such as banks or specialized companies with their own payment acceptance points or automated terminals.
Thanks to the combination of the parties’ capabilities, subscribers can conveniently top up their accounts using various payment methods offered by the partners — through applications, terminals, etc. And for mobile operators, this system is critically important, as all financial revenues are received exclusively through it.
Although the main function of the platform is accepting payments, PGW can be easily integrated with a number of other systems and services, which covers a large number of needs of the client-operator and simplifies the process of receiving payments from users. For example, it can be a system of additional financial services, such as paying for goods with funds from a mobile account.
Before implementing the product, the PGW team performs a mandatory load test of the system and determines (because such systems process tens of thousands of transactions in a fairly short period of time) what is the maximum number of transactions that the system can consistently process in accordance with customer requirements, what is the transaction execution time, etc.
Advantages and capabilities of the PGW system
Adaptability
The Payment Gateway product can be adapted to different requirements and needs of customers – to replace an existing self-service system or seamlessly upgrade an outdated one, and add all the necessary integrations.
The first implementation of the product took place in 2012. The client was a large mobile operator in Uzbekistan, which at that time had about 15 million subscribers. The customer had a self-written payment acceptance system. It was quite inconvenient, difficult to maintain, and constantly required additional financial investments. The implementation of the PGW product completely replaced the self-registered platform, reduced costs, simplified the technical support process, and it is still in use by the client (the solution’s technology stack is already a certain standard).
Another rather uncommon implementation of the PGW functionality is currently underway. Compared to 2012, the new payment gateway system will have a lot of changes. In fact, from the basic system, the team is developing an entirely new solution for the individual needs of the customer.
Whatever are the client’s needs, the system is modifiable and adaptable to suit them, regardless of time.
High availability platform
For any operator, accidents or errors mean loss of revenue, so any downtime in the system is unacceptable. One of the many important advantages of PGW is the high performance and availability of the platform, which enables quick resolution of accidents or failures.
How does it work?
We specially configure three nodes for the client’s system (although one node is enough for operation). This is done to ensure that in the event of an emergency failure of two nodes, at least one will remain operational.
The system is distributed among several client servers, and in case of an emergency failure of a part of the server, all its functionality is additionally duplicated on other servers. If all the servers are located in the same location, for example, in city X, the switchover is automatic.
If the client’s servers are located in different cities and the system is distributed, geo-redundancy is used. So, if a server in the data center in city X completely fails, the load is quickly transferred to a server in city Y without losing data.
Redundancy of nodes, proper load balancing, and constant monitoring ensure the system’s continuity.
Unique benefit
The core of a system like PGW is a database. One of the most popular databases of all time is Oracle – reliable, high-performance, and expensive. The price can reach up to $300,000, and there is an additional payment for technical support of the platform.
The unique advantage of the PGW system is that it has no paid components and integrates with any free Open Source database. It is more affordable and easier to maintain. Thus, this software is competitively priced, which is a great advantage for customers.
Seamless migration of system
Switching from one system to another is always costly and difficult. As practice shows, there are certain nuances that can be encountered during a system change. Migration from any system to the PGW product can be seamless. That is, it is completely invisible to both the client-operator and its partners.
In one of the cases, the PGW team recreated the interface of the old system on the PGW system for the transition phase. This was actually an integration of the content of the PGW payment system with the interfaces of the old system.
The existing protocols of the old system had to be changed to the new system so that the operator’s partners did not change anything and could work as they were used to. The transition took place, and users did not notice any changes in their work.
Phased implementation
Switching from the old system to the new one in one day is always a challenge and a certain risk, because in case of a small inaccuracy or force majeure, the client may incur significant losses. Therefore, the PGW system can be implemented in stages.
For example, first, several trusted partners can be switched to the system one by one and make sure that the system works correctly. During this transitional stage, both the old and the new system will work simultaneously.
And only when the team and the client are convinced that the new system is working smoothly and the implementation was successful, do they transfer all partners. This is how the full transition will take place.
High requirements for delays
Payment Gateway is a highly loaded system that can process hundreds of transactions per second. Therefore, there are high requirements for fast payment processing. It is impossible to respond to a subscriber about a successful (or unsuccessful) transaction for several minutes. The response must be instantaneous, because at that very moment the subscriber may be in a hurry and will try to make a deposit to his or her own account or the account of another subscriber, this is the standard for providing such services and the solution must meet this requirement.
Upload and reconciliation of data
Financial services involve maintaining a large number of regulatory documents. To keep track of all these transactions, the system provides a function for uploading completed transactions.
This is a rather complicated process, as T-PGW uploads successful, unsuccessful, canceled transactions, etc. from the system online. The frequency of uploading transaction data varies.
Troubleshooting for incomplete and canceled transactions is performed separately after the data is uploaded. Or erroneous ones, when a partner sends transaction data, but only 3 days later notices an inaccuracy, cancels it, and the money is already withdrawn from the subscriber.
Another feature of the system is data reconciliation, which takes place daily with both the partner and the customer’s system. The partner provides information about the transactions that took place in its system on a daily basis, and the product team checks them against its transaction data.
There are, of course, differences between the data from all parties – some of them did not record a particular transaction. It is in order to identify and resolve these disputes that the process of reconciliation and reporting takes place, both in terms of amounts and number of transactions.
Inaccuracies in the reconciliation process are also corrected manually. Specially assigned system administrators look for differences and their causes and eliminate them.
Security management: monitoring threats and alarms
In order to ensure that the system works as well as possible for all its users, PGW has a well-developed system for monitoring threats and alarms.
All errors or excessively long transaction queues are well-monitored and corrected.
Threat monitoring includes several dozen indicators that the product team monitors daily with different frequencies – every 5 minutes, every few hours, and even once a week.
In the event of any discrepancies, notifications are generated (in the form of SMS messages or emails) for different levels of users on the client side: administrators, audit, and business users.
Alarms also have levels of importance and special sending schedules. Normal alarms are not sent out at night but only come to everyone in the morning. The system notifies users of the most urgent ones even at night.
In addition to emergency alarms, regular reports are provided. For example, business users receive the amount and number of partner transactions once a day.
Additionally, the system can be connected to an external multi-level monitoring system. Zabbix is a free system for monitoring computer network load and statuses that monitors servers, processor load, memory, and disk volumes, as well as business parameters provided by PGW, such as the number of business transactions per second, SMS sent, etc.
Reliability engineering & system safety
To protect data, the system uses a cluster database. If one of the nodes fails, the database continues to work. When the node is restored, data is automatically synchronized.
Also, each database node performs automatic online backups with the ability to restore to the last successful transaction.
It should also be noted that the payment system does not process personal data of payers. The system has integrated financial instruments responsible for the security of processing personal and banking details of the payer. These instruments have the appropriate certification to process such sensitive information. Such a secure payment gateway can be flexibly integrated with any service at the client’s request.
Troubleshooting
To troubleshoot problems efficiently, you need to analyze logs from different subsystems. It is impossible to monitor all logs on all servers. Therefore, PGW has a centralized log collection system.
One of the server nodes has special software that collects all the logs from everywhere and “compiles” them in one place. It is convenient to search and check them, because they are all in one place.
In addition to the centralized collection of logs, there is also a “database” into which all these logs are uploaded — Elasticsearch load balancer. All logs are stored there for a certain period of time. You can view them, get statistics on them, and build graphs. Therefore, it is very easy to troubleshoot problems in the PGW system thanks to these features.
The PGW system can also be integrated with a side service to deliver audit information that is important to the customer. This can be information about the connection of any user to the user interface (when they log in to the system) or when a user connects to the database (but not through the user interface, etc.).
The implementation of PGW allows mobile operators to automate, track and simplify the transaction processing. Online recharge of subscribers’ balances and management of resellers is fast and hassle-free.
Instead of the conclusion
Payment Gateway by Telesens is not just a product, but a reliable complex solution that ensures uninterrupted operation for mobile operators and a comfortable experience for customers.