JoPACC expedites digital payments with Oracle Cloud

The Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC) needed solutions to enhance its existing IT infrastructure. The company wanted to ensure that digital payments in the Kingdom were safe, efficient, interoperable, accessible, and up to international standards.

The company was launched in 2018 and spun out of the Central Bank of Jordan, which maintains 45% ownership, with the remaining 55% owned by all the operating banks in the Kingdom. JoPACC manages and operates multiple digital payment systems in the Kingdom. One of them, JoMoPay (short for Jordan Mobile Payment), is a switch for mobile payments. It proved particularly valuable for people without access to banking services, due to geographic isolation or low income. CliQ for instant payments is another system that enables banks to provide instant fund transfers between client bank accounts.

JoPACC wanted to upgrade its existing infrastructure because some elements were outdated and needed to be replaced to increase efficiency. Dealing with multiple vendors for servers, switches, and other infrastructure elements was time-consuming for the company. JoPACC had to manage several contracts, maintenance schedules and payments, and communications channels to keep work on track. Moreover, delays in delivering the requested infrastructure changes were blocking time-to-market targets.

Also, JoPACC needed a solution that would be well-integrated into the company’s processes. Scalability, agility, security, and efficiency were top priorities for JoPACC’s management

Most of JoPACC’s applications and its databases are already Oracle-based. But the prior relationship wasn’t the only reason JoPACC chose Oracle. When compared with other cloud providers, JoPACC found that Oracle provides superior price, performance, security, and scalability. In addition, Oracle would help ensure compliance with Jordan’s local regulatory requirements for service outsourcing, since approval  of the Central Bank of Jordan is needed for standards including privacy and isolation of workloads to enhance security.

Also, Oracle’s pricing structure gave JoPACC the option to license software at flexible time intervals, with discounts and credits, making it easy for JoPACC to try new services without a big financial commitment.

After JoPACC deployed Oracle Compute and Oracle Database as a Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company saw a significant reduction in financial and non-financial costs of purchasing and procuring new infrastructure, operating systems, virtualization, database, and support.

Oracle relieved the responsibility of maintaining multiple vendor relationships, freeing JoPACC’s IT staff to focus on the core business of the company. Following the cloud deployment, JoPACC’s IT team has become more involved in core operational and business processes rather than managing hardware failures and other maintenance, which previously required huge resources, effort, and time.

The cloud deployment improved the company’s time to market, because provisioning Oracle Cloud Infrastructure requires almost no time compared with hardware procurement costs.

Also, the cost of running applications on OCI can be accurately calculated, which is crucial for making business decisions, taking into consideration the scalability for upscaling and downscaling to align IT resources with business needs.

JoPACC has maintained high quality of service for its stakeholders, with banks and payment service providers enjoying improved payment processing. Also, JoPACC uses Oracle FastConnect networking to offer private connectivity in partnership with two Jordanian internet service providers for redundancy.

For security, Oracle provides a cloud topology with the highest degree of isolation between devices. In addition to security, OCI enables JoPACC to bring its own network and infrastructure security, virtual machines, and/or licenses, to implement and deploy its own security standards and requirements. Additionally, the clear cost structure provided in Oracle Cloud allowed JoPACC to understand the exact costs for each of its payment systems. This transparency supports the business in decision-making and feasibility studies and also pricing mechanisms.

JoPACC launched a new instant payment system during COVID-19 and kept the business fully operating  during the lockdown. With the company on Oracle Cloud, it didn’t have to worry about maintaining infrastructure, hardware shipments, or office access because all employees could work at home securely. All systems continued running perfectly, just as they were prior to the pandemic.