For the past 12 years, OAB has worked on architecting a payment infrastructure to integrate the government of Oman and business partners through a sophisticated payment gateway for business-to-business and business-to-government transactions. Customers are able to use their payment cards through OAB, as well as POS and e-POS terminals that are integrated directly to various government applications and business partner systems, including retailers.

"Before using Paragon software, we had to construct the ISO 8583 financial messages by hand and rely on vendors for all of our testing," says, Hassan AbdulAli Al-Lawati, Deputy General Manager and Head of the Information Technology Group for OAB. "We were looking for a solution to provide complete ISO 8583 messages and give us the ability to test independently."

"With Paragon's FASTest for POS, we can easily propagate any ISO field, change the message structure as needed for the government application, and simulate POS messages for all kinds of transactions with magnetic stripe or EMV cards," adds Hassan. "We are able to do comprehensive testing using software instead of relying on devices. This has cut the project time and cost significantly."

Paragon worked closely with OAB to understand their project requirements and make adjustments to the POS format to meet their needs.

"It was a great honor to be selected by Oman Arab Bank for this important initiative," says Doug Daggett, EMEA Sales Director for Paragon Application Systems. "It's always interesting to work on new applications for our testing solutions. The team at OAB was excellent to work with."

"We were very happy dealing with Doug and the Technical Team at Paragon. There was tremendous support from all of the parties," adds Hassan. "This was one of the best projects I have worked on. The Paragon people were very skilled and experienced."