You wouldn’t drive a car without a dashboard – so why would you run a payment system without one?

It has been a while since I’ve driven a car without a speedometer, a fuel gauge, an odometer , or any other dashboard dials or gauges. In fact, I don’t know if I have ever driven such a car! I wonder what that experience would be like.  It might be fun until the moment when the police lights start flashing and you find yourself stopped on the side of the road. The anxiety is universal –chances are, we have all been there – stopped for speeding! Let’s face it; car manufacturers don’t make cars without dashboards for a reason. And none of us would drive a car without its dashboard. So why is it that people don’t worry about operating highly critical payment systems without the knowledge of how these systems perform on a minute-by-minute basis?

These days payment systems simply don’t fail. They are built for stability and reliability. They are built to withstand disastrous events. But you don’t have to have the full system collapse for things to malfunction. It’s enough if one part of the system is not working as planned for your transactions not to be processed accordingly: queues build up, cut-offs are missed, lines are down… and you might not know it until the next day’s report comes out! Unfortunately, these days, the world doesn’t function on “next day’s reports”. It’s an Information-on-Demand world out there and you’d better have that data before things go wrong!

Too often, IT organizations try to manage payment environments using infrastructure monitoring tools – the popular enterprise system management frameworks that provide general-purpose monitoring. But these monitoring tools are not specific to payments environments and fail to understand their critical nuances. They simply assess the physical state of the individual components. Payment Service Management (PSM), however, is a solution specifically designed to assess and manage the needs of the payment environment. With PSM, an organization can configure dashboards, alerts, and notification processes that are tied to payment events, like cut-off deadlines, up/down lines, positioning of specific critical customers and accounts. This ensures proper system functionality and allows potential problems to be indentified and dealt with immediately.

The importance of monitoring your system simply comes down to money – a non-available payment processing system results in losses of revenue and escalation of expenses.  Can your organization afford to get caught in this whirlwind? Just like the dashboard on your car, PSM can help you navigate to predictable and stable payment environment – a necessity in a global economy of constantly squeezed profit margins and financial instability.