CETREL, the Luxembourg affiliate of SIX Payment Services, needed to upgrade its Web Service capabilities to enhance API security, ensure long-term viability and enable new peer-to-peer mobile payment solutions. Axway API Gateway was chosen as a mobile backend for peer-to-peer mobile payments.

Innovations in Digital Banking

SIX is a leading European payments services provider, offering comprehensive solutions for cashless payment transactions. SIX Payment Services ensures payment processing for card issuers, as well as card acceptance for merchants. In a major initiative, the CETREL office of SIX Payment Services is collaborating with SIX headquarters to enable peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment (m-payment) solutions. At the end, Away API Gateway enable mobile payment solutions with different benefits :

• Rapid time to market: With this flexible and well designed system, changes can be implemented on the fly, and new interfaces delivered in record time. This is key for a solution like P2P. ƒ
• Faster and easier onboarding of new customers: Often, there is a discrepancy between specifications sent to banks and the way banks interpret that information. With Axway API Gateway, adjustments can easily be made to smooth the way for easy onboarding. ƒ
• 24/7 availability: During the day, work is routinely done on the platform to develop new functions while production continues unimpeded, ensuring that deadlines are met. ƒ
• Clustering & virtualization: Clustering is well implemented in Axway API Gateway, such that nodes can be worked on or new ones added — with no downtime. ƒ
• Security: Data flow security is very strong, and indeed Axway API Gateway is renowned for this side of the business. ƒ
• Stability, reliability and speed: Response time is rapid and the system extremely stable, whatever the complexity of operations carried out. ƒ
• Performance: System performance is excellent and there are no visible limits to the system’s capacity. In some instances, all data traffic was sent to just one of the four machines. That machine successfully handled the calls, with no slowdown at all.

Taking the long view, Stenuit Application Engineer CETREL concluded: “At SIX, we believe in partnerships. We appreciate the reliability of Axway and have confidence in their products and services…Axway API Gateway is a highly optimized, highly stable solution.”

Upgrading and modernize

Historically, banks would send a daily file of card transactions to process in batch mode — a system that was neither flexible nor responsive. To modernize, the CETREL office of SIX reviewed available technology, decided to implement API Web Services, and developed a solution in-house. In the new architecture, all API Web Service calls and security functions, including encryption, were moved to Axway API Gateway, enabling CETREL to focus on its core business activity and managing the payment card lifecycle.

“Securing API Web Services is not our core business,” said Xavier Stenuit, Application Engineer at CETREL. “Our business is payment cards. We needed to delegate responsibility for that task to professionals… The Axway platform came with a series of modules that we could adapt to protect ourselves from any imaginable kind of attack. It was so much easier than developing a system ourselves. With the Axway solution, the work of five or six people is replaced by one person working part-time, allowing us to make better use of our engineers capabilities.”

SIX manages the entire card lifecycle, from issuance and modification to cancellation. Each transactions includes up to 200 different security checks so SIX really want to ensure security at every stage.

The Peer-to-Peer Revolution

The solution enables person-to-person payments via smartphone apps. In the current implementation, users download the bank’s P2P app, transfer funds from their bank account to the app’s stored value, and then use those funds to pay other people. The solution will scale up rapidly in terms of volume of transactions. The P2P mobile payment solution of SIX went from drawing board to production in record time: 60 days.

Axway API Gateway at the Core of the Solution

Axway API Gateway is a key component of the P2P solution of SIX, where it is responsible for the movement of all funds, applying consistent security rules and including: ƒ

• Transfer of funds from the bank account to the smartphone
• Transfer of funds from the smartphone to the bank when a payment is made to another person, merchant or website

SIX also uses Axway API Gateway’s traffic screen, which shows the encrypted and decrypted contents of the message and the response. “We go to that screen to analyze a particular response, to resolve issues,” said Stenuit.

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