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KHAN: banks are seeing huge growth in total cost of ownership caused by running multiple systems.

Kamran Khan, chief operating officer, OpenWay Middle East, explains how the region's banks, telcos and payment processors have been benefiting from OpenWay's solutions, including payment gateways and settlement systems.

What implementations has OpenWay been involved with recently?

OpenWay Middle East is implementing a new Payment Gateway System (PGS) as part of the new billing system for Saudi Zain (MTC). This new system will be integrated with banks to provide simple and easy integration of payment and top-up to Saudi Zain from their partner networks (financial institutions, partners and dealers).

This Payment Gateway System will also provide settlement and clearing services for their customers to automatically pay for their telephone accounts and for settlement between dealers and Saudi Zain.

What functionalities are included as part of the solution?

The functionalities of the PGS include the following:

• Transaction switching between internal systems, modules and third parties in real time;

• End of day reconciliation and settlement between parties;

• Message formatting to address different formats and protocols;

• Provide device handling such as POS (point of sale) management;

• 24 x 7 operations in high availability architecture (fault-tolerance);

• Provide high throughput processing;

• Real time authorisation and clearing with banks for top-up via SADAD, the electronic bill presentment and payment system established by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority.

What modules make up the solution?

The solution has three main modules:

1. Payment gateway. Where WAY4 acts the primary transaction switch between all of MTC's systems, module and third party partners. The switch will provide real time authorisations for banks, dealers, MTC's channels. Our project will include connection to SADAD for Saudi Zain's customers to pay bills and top-up phones via banks' ATMs and networks.

2. Clearing and settlement. As real time authorisation completion takes place, WAY4 will also provide settlement and reconciliation with all incoming and outgoing systems, modules and third party partners. This includes handling of incoming settlement files or generating outgoing files.

3. Merchant/dealer management. This module provides the e-Top-up via merchants using a POS system and/or mobile phone (optional).

What do you think is the biggest problem faced by the banking and telco industries?

From a technical side, the big challenge faced by banks and telcos is the extraordinary growth in total cost of ownership due to multiple systems running on different platforms requiring multiple back-up systems.

Seamless integration, a centralised security system and the response time for the system are a few things to mention. From a business aspect, I believe the challenge is to integrate those business processes as seamlessly as possible, and then interoperability can be achieved.

Online transaction processing coupled with decision support is another business challenge facing banks and telcos.

How does OpenWay address concerns like total cost of ownership?

OpenWay has developed the WAY-4 solution as a single platform, with the WAY-4 framework powering a single real time product. It is capable of meeting huge volumes and operational efficiency challenges while achieving speed to market and cost reduction.

Due to its high capability for parameterisation, the customer has more independence to support the system throughout its life cycle compared to other systems.

Have you gone live with Procco, the Shariah compliant payment card processing company based in Bahrain?

Procco has gone live and is doing fine. Due to the above mentioned reasons they are looking to expand the business with OpenWay in other regions and buy other modules to have one unified system. I hope to be working with them again in the coming months.

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