Abstract:
The delivery of the Faster Payments system has undoubtedly put UK Payments at the forefront of payment processing solutions. The project was one of the most complex messaging solutions ever developed - at an industry cost of over £500,000,000 (which is half-a-billion pounds since we seem to have adopted the US billion) - with most Banks implementing Websphere based solutions to handle their message processing needs. \n\nSo why was it so difficult and costly to deliver, and what lessons can be learned for other high volume, critical message processing solutions? Issues such as:-\n\n * When multiple parties are involved in the end-to-end processing of a transaction, who should take ownership of transaction co-ordination?\n * How do you manage transaction flow rates into your systems when 13 parties are randomly ‘dumping' data into the system?\n * When ‘acceptable' system performance fluctuates by a factor of 10 between processing days, how do you monitor and alert poor system performance or at risk SLAs?\n\nAs a member of the Payments Industry-wide Technical Design Authority (TDA), and a consultant to many member Banks, I'll try to give some insight into what these challenges meant and how the industry addressed the challenge.