ElectraCard Services Triples Financial Transaction Processing Speed to over 12,000 Transactions per Second, Reduces Customers’ Total Cost of Ownership by 30%
 
 

ElectraCard Services Triples Financial Transaction Processing Speed to over 12,000 Transactions per Second, Reduces Customers’ Total Cost of Ownership by 30%

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ElectraCard Services is a subsidiary of OPUS Software Solutions and provides real-time, third-party credit, debit, prepaid, and smart card processing services in the U.S. and more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The award-winning company is an Oracle Specialized partner and has achieved Oracle Exadata Optimized and Oracle Exalogic Optimized status through the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

ElectraCard Services offers a number of solutions for issuing, acquiring, risk, and fraud management in its electrasuite product portfolio. The portfolio includes electraSWITCH, which processes ATMs, point-of-sale, internet, and cell phone banking transactions as either “on-us” transactions (where the issuing and acquiring bank are the same or part of the same group and no interbank transaction is required) or “switching mode” transactions, where foreign transactions must be sent to electronic fund transfer networks for authorization.

ElectraCard Services ported its electraSWITCH solution on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, and Oracle Linux. ElectraCard then tested the new system at Oracle Exastack Labs to prove it could meet customer requirements. The company achieved processing speeds of more than 12,000 transactions per second (TPS) and a twofold improvement in performance.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

  • Meet the transactional storage and processing requirements of large banks and financial institutions
  • Provide a scalable payment processing solution to large current and potential customers to meet their needs as their financial transactional volumes grow
  • Ensure that the electraSWITCH transaction processing platform maintained the same or better reliability, availability, and functionality, while increasing processing speeds and scalability

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Achieved processing speeds of more than 12,000 TPS on electraSWITCH in switching mode, three times the speed of the previous system
  • Realized a twofold performance improvement in average response times during switching mode transactions tests
  • Reduced total cost of ownership by 30% by eliminating transaction data bottlenecks to provide financial institution customers with maximum performance for price
  • Ensured high availability by running active-active configurations of electraSWITCH on multiple Oracle Database and Oracle Exalogic nodes so transaction data is replicated in real time
  • Developed a switching system capable of processing transactions from India’s 60,000 ATMs and up to 1 billion credit and debit cards, which could also be used as a blueprint for handling more than 1 billion records for India’s proposed national ID card system

Why Oracle

ElectraCard Services chose Oracle products for its electraSWITCH system due to Oracle’s excellent reputation in the financial services market. The company believed the Oracle products would best meet its availability, scalability, and reliability needs.

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine will empower banks to transform their operations and scale seamlessly to meet escalating transactional volumes,” said Sharad Somani, senior manager, marketing and alliances, ElectraCard Services. “Testing the system at Oracle Exastack Labs showed Oracle Exalogic has also significantly improved electraSWITCH’s processing speeds and will make the system easier to manage and maintain.

“The strong integration between Oracle’s products enables consistent upgrades, easy accessibility, and more than meets our customers’ real-time needs in a dynamic financial market,” he added.

Implementation Process

After helping ElectraCard Services test and fine-tune the new system internally, Oracle tested the electraSWITCH system at two of its Oracle Exastack Labs in India. The company is currently positioning electraSWITCH on Oracle Exadata to several of its large customers.

“Testing electraSWITCH against industry best practice results adds weight to our tenders,” said Somani. “We can show potential customers how the system performs in near-real life so they can really see the benefits they will achieve.”