Designs Systems Launches OS/400 Payment Processing Software

Corrected: June 6, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Design Systems recently launched new software for processing credit and debit payments electronically from an OS/400 server. Payment Courier directly connects to existing 5250 applications, and can complete a payment transaction over the network in as little as two seconds. An official with the New Jersey company says Payment Courier is particularly well suited as a replacement for manual payment processes, such as those utilizing keypads provided by banks and using slow dial-up connections.

You would be surprised at the number of OS/400 shops using manual payment processing technologies, including the keypad devices that merchant banks provide retailers and other businesses to process orders arriving over the telephone, says Design Systems product manager Don Clark. "A customer service representative has to write down the information, get up, stand in line with their piece of paper, and either put the customer on hold or call them back with an authorization number," he says. "It's a lot of manual effort, and not the most expeditious with customers."

The same processes are also used with catalog-based orders that arrive through the mail. In some cases, these iSeries users have a PC-based program they can use to complete orders with the payment processors over the Internet. But PC-based systems have the same problem: "It's not integrated with their iSeries systems," Clark says.

This was the level of sophistication encountered by Design Systems when one of its customers asked it to modernize its payment systems. The customer, which Design Systems would only identify as being in the commodity wholesale distribution business, was feeling the efficiency pinch from requiring its customer service representatives (CSRs) to manually process 100 to 200 orders over the phone every day.

As a systems integrator, Design Systems first inclination was to research pre-packaged third-party software that might fit their client's need. "When we looked at the landscape, we found that a lot of the products are somewhat dated, and have been around 10 to 12 years," Clark said. "Given the landscape, we decided to develop the application as opposed to looking any further."

What Design Systems came up with is Payment Courier, a native OS/400 application written with a combination of Java and LANSA development tools. The software has been in production at the customer site since January, and several more clients are in the pipeline Clark says.

First and foremost, Payment Courier is an iSeries application. The software was designed to integrate with existing RPG applications, and features a 5250 console that gives CSRs at phone- and catalog-based retailers the tools to complete an order from their work stations. "All that it requires is a competent RPG programmer to put the calls in it," Clark says.

In addition to the 5250 console, Payment Courier Standard Edition also features a Web access module that plugs into e-commerce Web sites, so customers enter their own information, as opposed to having a CSR on the other end of the phone directly enter the information into the OS/400 application. Design Systems also built an advanced version of the product, called Payment Courier Adaptive Edition, that's designed for customers that have already accumulated payment information for their customers in a database.

Design Systems built flexibility into Payment Courier, Clark says. "We've created a very modular structure where a lot of the application is reachable through an API," he says. "The 5250 transaction console gives you a lot of integration capabilities without having to do a lot of application modification."

Payment Courier can process all types of payments (including credit, debit, and card not present) on many different payment networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express) by using Authorize.Net, a payment gateway service that fronts the card interchange network. As opposed to supporting the half dozen or so individual banking networks directly, which can be expensive and time consuming, customers can rely on Authorize.Net to connect to those networks, which can save companies time and integration effort, Clark says. Fees for Authoirze.Net start at $20 per month and 10 cents per transaction.

In terms of security, Payment Courier is fully compliant with Payment Card Industry standards. This means it doesn't store credit card numbers in human-readable form, and it doesn't store the three-digit CVV number (an anti-fraud device required for card-not-present transactions); it also makes use of address verification, another anti-fraud device. The product uses SSL encryption to communicate with Authorize.Net, and maintains a log of all activity.

Payment Courier runs on OS/400 V5R1 and higher, and requires Apache HTTP Server, OS/400's Digital Certificate Manager, OS/400's Crypto Access Provider (128-bit), the Java Developer Kit (JDK) 1.4 or higher, and at least 500MB of storage and 512MB of memory.

Payment Courier version 1 is available now. Licenses for the Standard Edition are $25,000, while the Adaptive Edition costs $15,000. For more information, visit www.designsystemsinc.com.

This article has been corrected. Licenses for Payment Courier Adaptive Edition are $15,000. IT Jungle regrets the error.