Velocimetrics launches real-time payment monitoring

This enhanced solution enables banks operating payment platforms to gain a detailed, real-time, understanding of the status of all payments as they flow across the end-to-end payments process in a single view. This is possible even in highly complex environments tracking each and every payment using an independently allocated, unique and searchable identifier, so the exact location of any given payment, or batch of payments, can be instantly revealed.

Applying knowledge and experience gained developing a custom payments solution based on Velocimetrics’ technology, VMX Payments builds on existing functionality whilst introducing a series of new features designed to address the specific monitoring requirements of the payments process.

The payment processing environments operated by some long-established providers can prove highly complex and VMX Payments addresses a growing need to achieve complete visibility of payments as they move across these infrastructures, presenting the potential to replace previous system-by-system or process-by-process monitoring with a more holistic approach. As payments get faster, gaining this degree of independent operational oversight, along with access to the real-time analytics required for quick decision-making, is becoming increasingly important as the time available to resolve issues, identify exactly which payments have been delayed and notify impacted clients is rapidly diminishing.

With the ability to capture data from files, network traffic, messaging middleware, and from inside application code, in any combination, VMX Payments has been designed to enable firms to gain a thorough comprehension of how all payments are flowing across their complete environment. Users can then zoom in and understand the activities taking place around specific processing stages of interest.

Enabling system and process interdependencies to be accurately understood, users can precisely predict the impact of system changes on other infrastructure elements, avoiding unexpected outages and more effectively identifying opportunities to rationalise the total number of systems in operation. Doing so can significantly reduce the infrastructure’s overall complexity, the volume of manual payment health checks that need to be performed, maintenance costs and the potential for SLA breaches.

By independently creating and allocating each payment a unique identifier, VMX Payments then allows every single payment within the process to be tracked from the very moment it is received right up until the point it is passed onto the recipient. Without modifying existing systems, using this searchable identifier the exact location of any given payment, such as those feared missing or delayed, can be instantly identified and client queries quickly addressed. Combined with payments specific alerting features, notifying users, for example if a high value payment is approaching its cut-off time and has not yet completed, the unique identifier will instantly pinpoint the problematic payment’s exact location.

Additionally, by rapidly reconstructing all completed processing stages; VMX Payments is able to instantly retrieve the information necessary for effective decision-making and issue resolution. This is possible regardless of whether the payment is intra-day or scheduled to complete in stages over multiple days, weeks or months. This approach can slash issue repair times to a matter of minutes and significantly reduce associated costs.

As VMX Payments captures and indexes all information about the transactions tracked, any given payment, or group of payments, can be found using an unrestricted range of attributes. These could include the customer’s account number or name, payee details, the payment’s cut-off time, or the processing stage it is currently completing, even in very high volume environments. With this functionality, in the event of a technical outage, VMX Payments can instantly generate a report detailing exactly which payments were being processed by the impacted system and the clients that submitted them along with additional attributes to help effectively manage the situation and the client’s experience of it. Customer servicing teams can then use this intelligence to proactively notify impacted clients and accurately address inbound client queries.

Designed to be implemented quickly and independently of existing systems, VMX Payments offers a highly scalable monitoring solution able to effectively support both global and domestic payments systems.

Commenting on this development Steve Colwill, Velocimetrics’ CEO stated
‘Building on practical knowledge gained applying our technology to payments processing, with VMX Payments every single transaction being processed can be effectively and independently monitored through the entire processing lifecycle. Instead of just monitoring the IT infrastructure, VMX Payments tracks what clients and customers really care about, the payments themselves.’