Predictability is power – but how do you achieve it?

It seems lately that even the stock market has caught the news bug. Regardless of the actual performance of economies around the world, a single piece of bad news risks sending the global markets tumbling down;  a single piece of positive news can send them flying high. I have completely lost hope in making my stock portfolios work for me – for any predictable power, one needs to be on her toes every single minute of the day and night, with access to all possible information sources.

I imagine that those of us who operate mission-critical payment systems have a similar sense of anxiety. Take for example the case of an acquirer in South America, growing at 10% per week! At such an extreme growth, how do you make sure you keep both your partners and your customers happy, ensuring that every one of the millions of monthly transactions that go through your system is processed as designed? In such an aggressive environment, can you honestly say that your performance is “predictable and profitable”?  You don’t have to be growing that fast to excuse less than perfect performance.  Unfortunately, while your senior management might accept the excuses, your customers and partners won’t.  With all the available technology these days, performing less than “predictable and profitable” should not have an excuse.

In other words, what should Payment Service Management mean to you? Here is the top list of “must haves” to make your payment systems performance predictable:

1. Incorporate a single dashboard view that highlights all events and underlying components from payment perspective. You can immediately draw correlations and discover environmental problems, be it application, networks or infrastructure-based.
2. The ability to drill into specific components and transactions right from the main monitoring screens – switching between payment and monitoring applications takes time, which you don’t have in moments of crisis.
3. Business-specific, real-time insight into your payments and their processing - traditional monitoring tools don’t typically incorporate application data because of the large requirement for integration.
4. Real time transaction data should be presented across multiple dimensions – you must be able to slice and dice the available data to make your operations understandable and predictable.
5. Technically flexible and highly configurable – you should not have to pick up the phone and be charged thousands of dollars every time you want to make a change to a dashboard screen.
6. Out of the box integration with existing enterprise infrastructure monitoring solutions.
7. Ability to set thresholds for alerting and notification processes that can immediately dispatch the right staff, monitor and close the trouble tickets.

Set the above best practices in place, and you will hold the power of predictability and improved operations right in your hands. Your less vulnerable payment environment will help customers and partners trust in you and your operations. Yes, your stock portfolio (and mine) may still not be up to par, but success has multiple channels!