Despite the claims of some vendors, you cannot just buy a commercially agile future out of the box. You just cannot.
 
At Lusis Payments, our purpose is to simplify and perfect Retail Payments processing. We have been solving the world’s payments processing needs for decades using our robust TANGO software. We have earned a trusted reputation for delivering the highest quality solutions with sustained commercial agility.  So, what are the ingredients of commercial agility?

Embrace a Strategy of Change
An organization’s true competitive advantage comes from the strength of the relationships it builds with its customers, and its ability to adapt faster than its competitors. This is a journey of continual and accelerating change. Adopting a ‘Do It Later’ policy is a fool’s errand. Everything is about learning, starting later may simply be too late!

The enduring tragedy of clinging to legacy infrastructure is the insidious creepage of business constraints into the organizational processes. Ultimately, these constraining inflexibilities pollute the Corporate Thinking, be it in strategic vision, in resource investments, or in operational targets and budgets.

TANGO has been developed using the principle of “Configuration Not Code”. Consequently, customers can easily adapt TANGO to leverage new partners and services. Additionally, TANGO’s microservices architecture and robust Data Bus make it the most extensible Retail payments platform available. 

Learning Is Everything
If you are not changing your behavior, you are not learning anything. Making change an organizational habit is a team sport that has clear implications for Governance and Compliance policies. Nurturing adaptive change also has profound implications for how you architect your new solution. Most significantly, testing moves to the center stage. A strong and precisely managed testing function is a critical facilitator of change. Without advanced testing capabilities you will struggle to manage the collective risks and emotions that are an inescapable facet of change.
“Experiment. Fail three out of five times. If that’s not your ratio, you’re not experimenting, but waiting for enough information to act. You can’t escape the mediocre that way.” - Temel Guzeloglu, Chief Executive Officer QNB Finansbank, Turkey

Personalized Consumer Journeys
Each service touchpoint is a relationship building opportunity, whether the consumer is your own customer or ‘just’ a guest. Modern consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and demanding in how their needs are met. If you can’t do it, they will find others who will. True loyalty is founded on earned respect - not tradition. Personalizing the consumer’s experiences is a crucial ingredient for empowering consumer trust and organizational growth.
TANGO provides the ultimate in workflow flexibility including the ability to configure any combination of processing rules based on any message data elements. For example, processing services could be personalized based on card BINs, card types, merchant type, or time of day.   
Pick the Right Partners
Choosing the right teammates to match your own vision and ethos, and agreeing how you will work together, are possibly the most important decisions you can make. Too often, organizations start their partner selection with a feature-by-feature checklist of off-the-shelf solutions. This strategy only perpetuates the status quo and fosters an inability to react to new growth opportunities.

“Rethink your partners to ensure you are among partners that deliver what is needed, and readily embrace the principles of co-evolving solution journeys.”

Sustained success requires a journey of continuous problem solving, where WHO you work with, and HOW you work together, has a higher impact on your successes than the fine detail of WHAT you start with. A “Pick What’s There” mindset fails because your needs will change faster than you think – because the game changes faster than you can predict.

Lusis’ customers enjoy long term benefits from TANGO as a result of its superior technology, and from Lusis’ decades of experience in delivering and supporting advanced Retail payments solution.  

As we begin the New Year, we’d like to express our deepest gratitude to all our clients, partners and teammates for making it an exceptional year.
 
We would like to highlight four major milestones in 2022:
 

• Lusis formed a partnership with Mastercard Access which expands payment platforms for Mastercard while allowing Lusis to connect to previously unreached payment flows, both MA and non-MA processed payment flows and services. The partnership also creates additional market reach for MC and expands our North American customer base by allowing multiple schemes, networks and services. Customers benefit with simplified access to more networks, reduced time to market, costs, integration resources, and Mastercard services via API.
  

 

• Another major highlight includes a strategic investment agreement with Bank of America. This agreement provides Bank of America a minority shareholding in Lusis Payments and an appointed representative on the Lusis board. Lusis technology is playing a crucial role within Bank of America’s payments services. The TANGO suite from Lusis Payments is a leading retail payments solution for acquiring, routing, switching, authentication, authorization, and fraud prevention. “We are proud to serve Bank of America’s payments needs with our TANGO software. This latest agreement deepens our relationship and ensures that Lusis Payments remains on the forefront of global Retail payments innovation”  -Philippe Preval, CEO Lusis Payments. Bank of America is one of the world’s leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses, and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services.
  

 

• 2022 saw banks giving significant attention to their “Cloud Strategy”, whether it be in the planning stages or early implementations. The question that banks need to ask themselves concerning their Cloud Strategy is what software investments are required to improve operational efficiencies, streamline the customers’ journeys, and increase competitive agility. Simply shifting the same tired, poorly integrated ‘software blobs’ into the cloud may save a few bucks, but it does very little to Transform their business. With our proven cloud-based TANGO deployments, Lusis has seen a dramatic increase in interest for our Cloud solutions that improve an organization's operational efficiencies and customer experiences. Our partnership with HPE as their chosen payments solution for the GreenLake cloud platform further indicates our expertise in the cloud space.
  

 

• Lusis continues to expand our technical resources around the globe with a new office in Mexico and the expansion of our Toronto office.  
  

As we look forward for 2023 which includes many new announcements to share, we would like to wish all of our customers, partners and staff a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!

By Dave Smith - Consultant, Lusis Payments
 
It was John Gage of Sun Microsystems who coined the phrase, “the Network is the Computer” - way back in 1984.  Understandably, this phrase was originally more of a vision than the reality. However, the ensuing 38 years of computing development has generated incredible progress.  With the advent of Cloud computing we now live in a world where on-demand computing infrastructure can be readily purchased and deployed within any geographic region.
 
Surely we can agree that the computer industry has fully delivered Gage’s historic vision. 
 
However, putting aside the numerous technical achievements we also need to consider the functionality of the software itself.  A recent banking experience provided a sobering reality check and several points to ponder.
 
My “customer journey” started when I needed to update the registered address on my business account.  This was accomplished easily enough using the online banking facilities.  The real challenges started when I tried to change the address on the associated credit card. I had naively assumed that this could also be done online - given that both my business account and credit card were issued by the same bank.
 
After a lengthy wait in the phone queue, the support agent for the credit card team informed me that the address change for account had not updated on her system yet. Furthermore, it could take up to 3 business days to complete. Additionally, it wasn’t clear whether I would automatically receive a notification message once the credit card address was changed. What!?
 
So much for the “seamless customer journey” ideas that I hear being preached at banking conferences.      
 
Today, banks are rightly giving significant attention to their “Cloud Strategy”, whether it be in the planning stages or early implementations.  The recent acquisition of Cloud payments specialist, Renovite, by JPMC demonstrates the importance some banks are assigning their Cloud strategies. 
 
In my view, a cloud strategy should not become overly distracted by the technology itself.  The staggering levels of investment being injected by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others, will ensure that the Cloud will consistently become better and better.
 
The real question that banks need to ask themselves concerning their Cloud Strategy is what software investments are required to improve operational efficiencies, streamline the customers’ journeys, and increase competitive agility.
 
Simply shifting the same tired, poorly integrated ‘software blobs’ into the cloud may save a few bucks. It might even win the CIO some Brownie points.  But it will do very little to Transform their business.
 
Hopefully, it is the Transformative potential of the Cloud that will guide the banks’ strategies beyond the short term cost gains.

Contact Lusis Payments when developing your Cloud strategy for solutions that improve your organization's operational efficiencies and improve customer experiences.

by David Smith
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​As a long serving practitioner in the ATM Industry I have witnessed several policy decisions that really intrigued me.  For example, some banks take the stance that their in-branch automation is solely for their own customers. Others, take a more inclusive approach allowing non-bank consumers to use their facilities alongside their own clients. I have certainly experienced both sides of this question in different parts of the world.
 
As a fan of consumer-centric businesses, I favor the latter approach, although I understand the rationale of the “my customers only” principles. However, the policy thinking around “who will you serve?” becomes further convoluted when you recognize that many banks run promotions to attract new customers, offering money to new customers as a signing-up reward. Sometimes these incentive payments can reach £100 or more.
 
Surely, allowing non-bank consumers to use your branch automated services can be a powerful recruitment aid. I mean, you know exactly where they are at that point in time, what they are doing, and you have staff on hand to help and advise them appropriately.
 
Surely this is a good thing, right?
 
Once you truly embrace every consumer interaction as an opportunity to learn something new, to deepen the relationship, then you fundamentally change the possibilities for growth.
 
Traditionally, banking automation was mechanically sophisticated but depended on proprietary vendor software to work. Consequently, banks often faced substantial costs for even simple customizations, particularly if they had a mixture of hardware from different vendors. Under these circumstances it was difficult to personalize the consumer’s experience, or to differentiate yourself from your competitors in a meaningful way. An investment in vendor-independent ATM software ensures true portability across any self-service device, thereby reducing costs and creating a greater choice in hardware.
 
Happily, this restrictive situation has changed significantly with the growing market trust in vendor-independent, multi-vendor, ATM software. Additionally, the ATMIA’s new blueprint architecture clearly separates the task of terminal management from the payments switch, and embraces the versatile ISO 20022 messaging standard instead of the proprietary and more restrictive NDC protocol. These changes eliminate two of the greatest blockers to service flexibility.
 
Banks now enjoy ready access to affordable self-service technologies, freeing them to create any branch experience they want. The next leap forward in ATM channel excellence is the application of relevant, real-time consumer information in a way that benefits both the consumer and the bank. Specifically, this step involves the deployment of workflow orchestration and machine learning-based recommendation engines.
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So, how might a bank leverage workflow and recommendation engine technologies to improve their in-branch experience for both their own, and the non-bank, consumers?
 
Traditionally, an ATM would collect the card and PIN information before sending any information to the switch. This is all ‘dead-time’ during which the bank has no information about the consumer to act on.  In a more consumer-centric approach, the ATM sends the card information to the switch as soon as it is entered. The switch replies with relevant consumer information that can be used to personalize the services offered. In addition, advisory information can be sent to a branch agent’s device notifying them about the consumer, the machine they are using, and what should be done.
 
Furthering this illustrative scenario, the recommendation engine might determine that a non-bank consumer qualifies for an account sign-up special offer or other guest services based on the number of previous visits, the time of day, transactions performed, etc. Special offer vouchers could be dispensed via the receipt printer for redemption with a branch agent. Simple guest services could include the waiving of the acquiring fees in return for phone number information or other contact details.
 
Numerous other relationship-building options can be easily and affordably implemented with today’s technology. The biggest obstacle to the creation of consumer-centric ATM channels used to be the infrastructure but this is no longer true. A much larger obstacle, in my opinion, is the legacy mindset among senior stakeholders that rejects the ATM channel as a vehicle for innovation and richer consumer services.
 
The financial pressures causing banks to close branches on a large scale are highly unlikely to subside any time soon. This situation is further aggravated by regulatory pressures on banks to provide third party access to consumer data – thereby inviting new competition for financial services. Now, more than ever, banks need to focus more about personalizing the consumer experiences they create as a means to strengthen brand loyalty and growth.

TANGO is the world's most performant Retail Payments solution with benchmark tests demonstrating 10,000 transactions per second. Built using a micro-services architecture, TANGO is also feature-rich and easily extensible. Backed by Lusis' proven track record it is not surprising that more and more organizations are swapping out their legacy payments infrastructure for TANGO.

TANGO is the culmination of decades of crafted engineering that ensures the maximum operational performance and reliability as well as the most affordable cost of ownership. For example, TANGO includes a Self-Monitoring and Auto-Spawning feature whereby a suite of timers can be configured to monitor the processing time for specific events. By comparing the real-time measurements against the defined norms TANGO can immediately identify bottlenecks as soon as they occur. TANGO can also be configured to automatically spawn new instances of the affected micro-service or process thereby ensuring the required throughput is maintained.

TANGO uses the Docker containerization platform and a typical deployment uses the 5-Container model shown below.

Significantly, the container boundaries are defined to simplify manageability. For example, the gateways and firewalls are combined in a
single container to simplify PCI certification tasks. Equally, the monitoring and other tools are located in a dedicated container to ease
system evolution.

This approach has numerous benefits, not least of which is that it is well proven and supports the easy and secure use of cloud infrastructure. However, in this model, container creation is still a manual process. Consequently, Lusis has expanded TANGO's container model to deliver the full elastic scalability advantages of a cloud-native environment.