At Lusis Payments, technology is our passion, and our clients are the heart of our business. We live and breathe payments platform technology, and we’re committed to maintaining our position as a market leader. Beyond payments, though, we’re striving to pave the way for new technologies that will enhance our current solutions and lay the foundation for future solutions that will take the industry by storm. Here’s what our team at Lusis Payments was up to in 2018, as well as a look at what’s ahead in 2019.
 
Out and About
We’re devoted to our clients and technology, but that doesn’t mean we’re chained to our desks. Last year, you might have met us at a Tandem User Group (TUG) event near Atlanta, Georgia (ATUG), or in Mississauga, Ontario (CTUG). You may have seen us at Forum TELECOM Nancy at Université de Lorraine. Maybe you visited our booth at the HPE NonStop Technical Boot Camp in Burlingame, California.
 
Industry Game Changers Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2)
PSD2 was implemented in 2018, and, per instructions from the European Union (EU), it requires banks to enable their customers to use third-party financial services vendors. This will shake up banks’ competition model. They’ll need to ensure that these third-party providers have access to their customers’ accounts through open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and third-parties will be able to build financial services on top of banks’ data and infrastructures. Competitive differentiation will become less about an account’s location and more about the services customers use. Read the full perspective by CEO, Philippe Préval at https://www.lusispayments.com/news/psd2-international-perspective
 
​​New ATM and POS Security Requirements
In August 2018, Lusis Payments released a report summarizing new security requirements introduced by PCI-PIN V3 that merge requirements from the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SCC) and the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc (ASC X9) for a single, unified PIN Security Standard for payments stakeholders. Two evolutions — ASC X9 TR-31 and ANSI TR-34 — have emerged from the standards and will introduce a massive change in ATM and POS remote key management. X9 TR-31 is a method consistent with the requirements of the ANS X9.24-1 standard for the secure exchange of keys and other sensitive data between two devices that share a symmetric key exchange.  ANSI TR-34 describes new rules to unify methods to build and store the original Terminal Master Key in ATMs and POS devices. Until now, each vendor has used its own methods to achieve this initialization. ANSI TR-34 specifies a method consistent with the requirements of ANSI X9.24-2.  Read the complete Lusis article at: https://www.lusispayments.com/news/update-security-pci-pin-v3-tr34-tr31
 
The Future of ATMs
Last May, we reported about new technologies that will affect the future of ATMs. Banks have two new initiatives on the table for cash delivery:

1. A wallet Device Primary Account Number (DPAN), which can use a smartphone radio-frequency identification (RFID) capacity and wallet instead of a card to allow customers to retrieve cash from ATMs
2. Using wallets to send cash to third-party holders, who then can retrieve cash from ATMs

 
The ATMs of the Future
Meanwhile, ATM vendors are introducing ways to expand typical ATM capabilities and help banks reduce labor costs without degrading the customer experience. These advanced banking machines provide assisted service hardware solutions similar to traditional ATMs, but additional software and hardware enable integrated two-way video conferencing with live tellers stationed at remote locations. The machines perform operations typically provided by live tellers, and they can serve as stand-alone video teller solutions or replace a portion of live teller agents inside branches. And the best part? Customers interact face to face with live tellers, so they still have the experience of personal interactions.  Read the full perspective by CEO, Philippe Préval at: https://www.lusispayments.com/news/the-future-of-atms-new-initiatives-from-vendors-and-banks
 
Our Goal: Pave the Way for the Future of Payments Tech TANGO Cloud Achieves 10,000 Transactions Per Second
Our clients’ customers continually seek better, faster and more accessible financial services and products, so Lusis Payments is dedicated to continuous improvement and providing the industry-leading payments technology solutions. Recently, we conducted another proof-of-concept (POC) benchmark on TANGO, our cloud-based transaction processing engine for mission-critical, 24x7 payments.
 
The POC showcases the TANGO architecture’s ability in a cloud environment. Completion of the benchmark validated that TANGO not only meets but also exceeds the 10,000 TPS mark with a constant response time. In our next POC, Lusis Payments will demonstrate that TANGO can exceed the 20,000 TPS mark in a standard cloud environment, and our third POC will benchmark TANGO in an HPE NonStop Cloud environment.
 
Revolutionizing the FinTech Industry With Artificial Intelligence
Lusis Payments is at the top of our game when it comes to payments systems, and, while we remain dedicated to continuous improvement of our platforms, we’ve also been investing and delving deeper into other technologies to enhance our current solutions. Even more exciting is how these new technologies could potentially diversify future Lusis Payments solutions and position us as not only a market leader but also a market disrupter.

In 2017, we launched a dedicated AI department, which leads our AI-based trading strategies, other FinTech solutions, and global retail payments software and services. Our central focus is on deep learning, which offers extraordinary power and flexibility for problem resolution. Today, we offer a broad range of FinTech solutions and services for capital markets.

But the applications for artificial intelligence and data science are infinite; in many ways, the tech industry has only begun to tap in to their potential. AI includes tools like machine learning, natural language processing and deep neural networks — tech that’s improving efficiency in almost every industry. One area where AI has more recently become a disruptor is in capital market applications. According to a Gartner survey, organizations in the banking and investment services industry are more likely to actively invest in machine learning and virtual customer assistants than those in other industries.

Lusis Payments has spent five years using data science approaches to analyze and improve our FX trading platform because we see great potential for AI to change end-to-end trading, automatic trading and portfolio management. In fact, our experts predict that AI will influence every aspect of capital market applications.

Happy New Year from all of us at Lusis Payments. We hope you’ll check back to learn about our advancements and initiatives in 2019.

​It was great to see so many attend the Atlanta Tandem User Group (ATUG) event last month in Alpharetta Georgia. As a gracious host, HPE let us use their facility for the day and even gave tours of the customer solutions center. It was an opportunity to see a virtual NonStop demo in action.

​The following week Lusis was honored to attend the Canadian Tandem User Group (CTUG) held at the HPE offices in Mississauga Ontario. It was great seeing so many of the NonStop users in Canada turn out for this event as well.  As a vendor, it allows us to share what Lusis can provide to new prospects as well as catching up with customers on their current endeavors.   

Recently, one of Lusis Payments’ clients, Bankserv Africa, performed a stress test of TANGO on their own Production and Test systems. The stress test was conducted on what was considered one of the busiest transactional days due to South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) payments. In the graph below, the blue line depicts actual transactions per second being run during each hour of the business day. On the same graph, the green line indicates the high volume capacity still available as determined by the stress test conducted on the system, even on this high volume trading day.

​Bankserv Africa’s Production and Test systems feature the same configurations therefore enabling like for like testing capability with regards to hardware, software and fail over scenarios. Their target was set at 600 tps. With the NonStop X, SSD and configuration, Bankserv Africa was able to see their systems have the capacity to achieve up to 1400tps, which over sought their target tremendously.
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