Payment Processing
For the wheels of commerce to run smoothly, the act of paying for a product or service with a credit or debit card must remain easy, efficient and safe. Payment processing is both highly regulated and constantly changing. Today each purchase launches a complex, automated and highly integrated process involving not just merchants but also banks, acquirers, payment processors and potentially a host of other players. Not so long ago this community was a relatively small club of organizations operating a largely isolated network, but increasingly that is no longer the case. A host of changes—technologies such as smartphones and digital wallets, shifts in buying habits, demands by individuals to accept card payments, and growing interest in peer-to-peer payments—have created a fierce battle within the industry, as organizations fight to maintain their position or disrupt the status quo. No longer a set of isolated payment processes, today’s entire payments ecosystem is just a component of the broader commercial landscape—playing an integral role in fraud management and data privacy as part of a comprehensive IT security framework that must span the Internet, mobile devices, social networks, and cloud services.