In today’s highly competitive Retail Payments market, there is no margin for error. To be successful, payments organizations need the very best technology, the right skills and experience, and the commercial agility to rapidly exploit any opportunities. It is a fact of business-life that all organizations have their ups and downs. However, the smart organizations continually pay attention to the critical factors that reduce the likelihood of ‘nasty surprises’, while also creating the best chances for accelerated success.

A simple ‘roll the dice’ strategy cannot ensure a future of strong growth, even if that’s how you have always ‘played’ before. The availability of powerful payment solutions like TANGO, the effectiveness of DevOps and Agile methodologies, and the perpetual shift in consumer demands are combining in a perfect storm. Unless of course, your organization can transform itself to thrive in this new era of Retail Payments.

Interestingly, the humble "Snakes ‘n Ladders" game provides a great metaphor for the ups and downs of a modern Retail Payments business.

SEEK COMPOUNDING GAINS
Fortunately, some business gains lead directly to further gains with a significant amplification of the overall benefits. Being more competitive comes from being able to learn and change more quickly than your competition. Using the TANGO micro-services payments suite delivers all the flexibility and commercial agility you need. This is clearly a crucial benefit. Additionally, with TANGO you can reduce your time and costs for compliance, support a wider range of consumer payments types, and easily form new business partnerships for accelerated growth. One ‘ladder’ leads to another, and another. Lucky dice throws aren’t guaranteed - but smart planning can, and does, make them more likely.

THE CHANGING ATM LANDSCAPE
Over the last decade, innovation in ATM services has been severely restricted as a result of several factors, including monopolistic business practices, restrictive legacy message protocols, and proprietary systems that became isolated from other banking channels and investment.

However, the exciting news is that this situation is poised for rapid, and positive, change. The ATMIA's new blueprint architecture specifically calls for cloud- based processing, the use of modern integration options including ISO 20022 and APIs, and greater flexibility for ATM deployers to tailor the consumer's experience themselves.

As a global leader in Retail Payments solutions, Lusis Payments is a strong contributor to the NextGen ATM initiative through its well proven TANGO transaction orchestration engine.

When it comes to payments processing, TANGO is simply in a class of its own with 4 of the top 10 banks already using TANGO to empower their consumer payments strategies. TANGO is functionally-rich and well proven within both large and small banks and processors around the world.

PERSONALIZED SERVICE: The New Battleground
Consumer expectations and payments technology have both changed significantly since the early days of ATM services. In particular, the personalization of services to match a specific customer’s need is now commonplace for most digital channels.

There is no doubt that business stakeholders are extremely interested in the attraction and retention of customers. In this respect the personalization of consumer service interactions is rightfully receiving significant investment.

The replacement of the restrictive legacy ATM message protocols with XML and JSON alternatives is re-writing the market opportunities for providing a personalized ATM experience to everyone. In a NextGen world, a consumer's journey can be continually refined in real time by the provision of relevant, consumer-specific information that dynamically enhances transaction workflows based on the consumer's profile and choices. Of course, this power requires the transaction switch to have the flexibility to retrieve and distribute the consumer's data securely and without unreasonable processing delays.

THE CLIENT
This client has over 55 years of experience as a leader in core banking processing. Their enterprise banking solutions empower institutions to grow their assets and reach new customers by integrating the latest digital technologies. The client's cloud-based core banking platform delivers a seamless mix of innovative, flexible, and secure banking services that provides institutions with a significant competitive advantage.

THE NEED: An Agile Payment Solution
The client has over 20 years in ATM processing that was founded on two different payments systems prior to the adoption of TANGO. Significantly, the client became increasingly frustrated by both legacy platforms due to the constraints they placed on the client’s business growth.  The slowness of vendor maintenance support, the lack of development agility for new customer services, and skyrocketing costs of ownership all led to the need for a better solution for their future.

Tired of navigating product and service obstacles with their original payment solution vendor the client turned to a second provider for help. This second provider was able to migrate them to their solution and provided adequate service and functionality for a few years. However, as customer demand for new services increased this second solution had also become stagnant and restrictive. The client then sought a third and final payment solution, one that demonstrably addressed the past growth issues.

It was critical that the new solution would provide an agile architecture with the robustness to handle diverse and high-growth volumes.
Additional high-priority requirements included;
•    the agility to continually, and rapidly, adapt to changing consumer needs,
•    the ability to rapidly create their own configurations on the fly,
•    a major reduction in application lifecycle costs.

THE SOLUTION: TANGO by Lusis Payments
The client performed an extensive research of all leading payments solution providers. Their findings indicated that there were decisive advantages in selecting TANGO from Lusis Payments.  TANGO and Lusis Payments’ reputation for service and innovation far exceeded all of their business and technical requirements. TANGO's architecture, flexibility, ease of use and lower cost of ownership were once again identified by another client as compelling advantages over other solutions.

A TRULY INTEGRATED TRANSACTION PROCESSING ENGINE
Lusis payments, the innovative provider of software and services to the payments industry, leads with TANGO, an online transaction processing engine for mission-critical 24x7 solutions including payments, retail, loyalty, finance, utilities, and transport. Payment processors across the globe rely on the total flexibility, high-performance processing, and built-in high availability of TANGO for acquiring, routing, switching, authenticating, and authorizing transactions across multiple channels, in a multi-institution environment across geographies. TANGO offers an open, integrated infrastructure that is highly scalable and efficient due to the genuine approach to SOA, which significantly reduces complexities and improves business responsiveness. With these attributes of TANGO, coupled with the fault-tolerance, near-linear scalability, and unmatched performance of HPE NonStop systems, the combined solution has been the go-to choice for many financial institutions (FIs) and payment processors to satisfy their mission-critical demands of highest efficiency and reliability.

A COMPLETE PAYMENTS SOLUTION BUILT FOR THE FUTURE
While payment processing is constantly evolving, the fundamentals have not changed—perform transactions at high speed with round-the-clock availability and absolute security. Changes come in the form of new financial services—how they are delivered and managed with increasing frequency. To keep pace in a dynamic industry and outperform competitors, you need modern, flexible solutions that help streamline new offerings. TANGO’s state-of-the-art technology and unparalleled configurability due to its microservices-based architecture foster creation of new business services rapidly, enable interoperability with in-house and third-party applications, and facilitate support for current and future payment components. And HPE NonStop is always adapting, such as hardware-independent HPE Virtualized NonStop in a VMware environment as well as support for rich tools for DevOps. Together, Lusis TANGO on HPE NonStop helps keep your payments processing environment at the forefront of financial services and customer experience.

TANGO ARCHITECTURE—FLEXIBLE, OPEN, AND HIGHLY AVAILABLE
A TANGO system is a set of services (SOA) implemented in multi-instance process modules and federated by the dispatcher (load-balancer) with communications facilitated via a universal data bus. The data bus provides a standard data format (Type/Length/Value [TLV]) for all messages exchanged between services. Hence, TANGO Payments Server has no restrictions on transaction types: both standard and nonstandard transactions can be easily defined in the system, as can new transaction types and message flows. This flexibility easily accommodates new requirements and integration of new payment opportunities including external services for fintech APIs.

TANGO’s specialized high-availability components integrated within the platform provide an active/active systems integration without the need for third-party solutions. The active/active support within TANGO allows any given terminal to connect to any of the application servers to provide 24x7 availability to customers.

And to further the advantages, TANGO’s architecture deeply integrates with some of the modern and core fundamentals of HPE NonStop such as use of OSS and TMF-protected SQL/MX database, and full exploitation of HPE NonStop “process pair” feature through its hypervisor process. The dispatcher functionality works together with HPE NonStop TS/MP to provide scalability and availability, and supports the active/active configuration. This further establishes HPE NonStop as one of the most ideal platforms to run your TANGO payments solution.

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Lusis Payments is pleased to welcome our newest industry partner, Bluefin Payment Systems. Bluefin is a payment security company that provides the leading security platform supporting payment gateways, processors and independent software vendors (ISV’s) in 29 countries. Bluefin’s secure payment platform is key to a holistic approach to data security. Designed to complement EMV and tokenization, Bluefin’s PCI-validated Point to Point Encryption (P2PE) solutions provide a solid security defense against current and future data breaches. Bluefin supports point of sale solutions for retail, mobile, call center and kiosk/unattended environments, and secure Ecommerce technologies.
 
Lusis is proud to offer our clients the option of Point to Point Encryption solutions from Bluefin that work seamlessly with our TANGO payments solutions. We are committed to providing our clients with the most innovative and secure solutions in the payments industry. We do so with win-win partnerships that further emphasize our to commitment to excellence within the industry.
 
If your organization would like to become a Lusis Payments Industry Partner, please contact Brian Miller at brian.miller@lusispayments.com.