Uncategorized - Polar Moment

Design, Development, Installation, and Deployment of Payment Systems at Mi-Pay

Established in 2003 to provide innovative digital payment solutions, Mi-Pay provides a portfolio of mobile payment services for mobile operators and financial service providers. Following continued growth, the company has become a leader in the mobile payments market. Its mission is to build solutions and services that provide the most efficient business processes for re-charging pre-paid accounts and low-value micropayment operations globally.

Mi-Pay offers a complete service for mobile operators, delivering cost reductions when managing pre-pay and post-pay payment services enabling operators to improve ARPU. The company delivers both business and technical operations covering all direct channel top-ups including internet, IVR, SMS, mobile applications and ATM.

Mi-Pay also provides a portal for the consumers to manage their pre-pay accounts from the web or mobile handset. Consumers can review their transactions, amend personal and payment details, and manage automatic top-ups. Through the use of these online services Mi-Pay delivers a superior level of customer service whilst lowering administrative and support costs.

Business and technical consultancy

Mi-Pay uses a complex and feature-rich Postilion system at the core of its transaction processing solution, successfully integrating RealTime and Office systems with its groundbreaking mobile payment platforms. Mi-Pay is continuing to push the boundaries of the Postilion solution by developing its own innovative applications using the Postilion software development kit.

Polar Moment has considerable knowledge and expertise of the Postilion solution and has worked with Mi-Pay on a number of projects including the development of automated regression test solutions, system analysis and design, installation, configuration and deployment of Postilion-based solutions, and software development.

Automated regression testing

Mi-Pay had experienced rapid business growth following the acquisition of several new customer contracts. Each new customer involved a software development project and, given the multiple client requirements, Mi-Pay’s existing test approaches and systems were no longer able to meet the increasing demands placed on the business. To support the continued business growth, Mi-Pay required sophisticated test solutions for its platform. Aimed at improving the productivity of its test activities, the test solutions would introduce
strong functional testing tools as well as highly-effective regression testing.

Mi-Pay needed a partner which could provide unparalleled knowledge and experience of card payment systems as well as practical experience in implementing high-volume critical processing solutions. The Mi-Pay management team were aware of the Polar Moment consultants who are recognised names in the payments industry. The Polar Moment technicians rapidly understood Mi-Pay’s business and technical requirements as well as its technical platforms which included its Postilion solution.

The Polar Moment team successfully delivered the sophisticated test solution required by Mi-Pay. This enabled the company to achieve its quality and efficiency objective and – three years later – these tools are still in use. Following the success of this project, Polar Moment was asked to continue to work with Mi-Pay for ongoing assignments.

System analysis and design

Polar Moment has completed several analysis and design assignments for Mi-Pay, including a significant project for du, one of only two national mobile phone providers in the United Arab Emirates. Implementation of du’s complete consumer payment platform is a major triumph for Mi-Pay. Following delivery of the core payment platform, du had new requirements which necessitated significant upgrades to the Mi-Pay platform. Upgrades included the development of transactional and management information interfaces between the two organisations, enhanced user administration and allowing additional payment types and channels. Given the scale and importance of the projects, it was essential that Mi-Pay delivered.

Mi-Pay required technically competent staff that it could trust to deliver the right solution to the end client. It was important that the team provided understood the Postilion solutions, the Mi-Pay platforms and possessed excellent knowledge of the payments industry in general. The selected team would be working directly with du thus good client-facing skills and the ability to instil confidence and trust were also imperative. Polar Moment was selected to provide the systems analysis and design services for the du project. The team built a strong working relationship with the end-client based on successful delivery of key outcomes.

The feedback received from du was extremely positive and the work of the Polar Moment consultants proved invaluable to the success of the project.

Software development

Mi-Pay had elected to outsource its Postilion software development activities to offshore locations – retaining responsibility for the project management, analysis, design and acceptance testing elements. Mi-Pay experienced a number of issues with software development due to the specialist nature of the Postilion product, including the following:

Delivered components did not accurately reflect business processes as development specifications contained insufficient detail to be fully understood by the software developers.

The work effort quoted by the offshore developers was significantly higher than expected owing to their lack of knowledge of the Postilion system.
Project deadlines were frequently missed because it took a long time for each new resource to become skilled in Postilion development.
Software which was delivered was often of a poor quality, causing further delays and customer dissatisfaction.
Communication between UK and non-UK development teams proved difficult incurring excessive management overheads to keep control of the software developments.

As a result, Mi-Pay opted to bring their software development in-house and approached Polar Moment to deliver the required level of Postilion skills.

The Polar Moment team already had a proven track record in delivering successful software development projects for Mi-Pay and was able to provide a core team of developers from the its head office in UK, backed-up by additional resources from the company’s Czech Republic office.

As well as delivering on-site resources to manage all Postilion development, the Polar Moment team also acts as a reference point for any related production or project issues.

Outcome

Demonstrating extensive Postilion skills and expertise, as well as an overall knowledge of the payments industry, Polar Moment has become a valued partner to Mi-Pay. Delivering significant business value, MiPay has continued to trust Polar Moment with its core processing and is currently working to help deliver Mi-Pay’s next generation mobile-payments solution.

Polar Moment Assists Euronet in Delivering SEPA-compliant Crossborder Processing Solution

Euronet is an industry leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions – serving clients in over 130 countries worldwide and processing over one billion payment transactions annually.

The company has an enviable and extensive client base and offers EFT software, network gateways and electronic, prepaid top-up services to financial institutions, mobile operators and retailers across the globe.

In 2007, Euronet signed a long-term agreement with a leading oil and gas group, OMV, to deliver its first SEPA-compliant, cross-border transaction processing solution. OMV wished to migrate decentralised acquiring operations across 12 countries into one single, central, SEPA-compliant processing platform. Upon full rollout, the Euronet platform will cover approximately 5,000 POS terminals as well as POS management and fuel card
authorisation services.

Cross-border, multi-currency payment solution

Euronet implemented a cross-border, multi-currency card payments and fuel card solution to enable retailers to send all of their transactions for processing to a single payment processor. The system provided support for EMV Chip and Pin cards and was implemented using a sophisticated Postilion system. In 2007, OMV became the first customer to adopt the new Euronet system. The system enables OMV to implement the same point of sale systems and technical infrastructure in every country, negating the need for multiple acquiring relationships, and enabling the retailer to operate a single head office accounts department.

Faced with complex and feature-rich customer requirements, aggressive project timescales and a requirement to provide experienced support functions to meet the expectations of OMV, Euronet chose Polar Moment – the leading provider of business and technical consultancy to the payments industry.

Postilion delivery

The implemented solution was based on a sophisticated Postilion platform and, as such, relied heavily on access to experienced payment technicians to deliver the following:

Preparation of test plans, scenarios and cases for point of sale and centralised processing functions.
Technical support to set-up a series of test and production environments to prove the system
deliverables.
A project team to liaise with the vendor on all technical matters.

Successful delivery of the project was reliant on in-depth knowledge of the Postilion system and considerable technical expertise. Euronet selected Polar Moment in the delivery of the OMV project.

The Polar Moment team took the lead in coordinating all Postilion-related activities, adding significant value to the project. Using its strong network across the payments industry, Polar Moment was able to provide Euronet with a team of nine highly experienced payment consultants within a matter of weeks. The Polar Moment consultants liaised with senior teams within Euronet and OMV to fully understand the business and technical drivers for the project. The team’s strong customer focus enabled Polar Moment to develop an
understanding of the cross-cultural requirements necessary to deliver the project successfully.

Polar Moment facilitated the preparation of testing activities for point of sale and centralised processing functions, proving key deliverables of the Postilion platform. Providing a highly qualified project team that could liaise directly with the vendor on technical matters, Polar Moment ensured that system specifications were implemented according to the design. All software upgrades and patches from the payment system vendor were checked for functional correctness before being passed to the test team. The project team also
supported the integration of Postilion elements with other Euronet applications. To ensure that the project continued to deliver added value to OMV once implemented, the Polar Moment team also:

Provided Postilion configuration support for updates such as adding new card types or rolling-out the service to additional countries.
Installed and configured software updates from the vendor onto test servers and provided initial testing before passing to the test team.
Completed go-live activities and liaised with the productions operations team for handover to live processing.

Production operations

Euronet relied on a team with strong knowledge and expertise working with Postilion systems. Polar Moment was selected to support the complex and feature-rich Postilion platform and to provide an extensive Postilion support function.

To support Euronet in the implementation of the OMV system, Polar Moment provided a team of experienced Postilion production support engineers. As well as providing a head of production operations to manage the entire platform, Polar Moment provided experienced Postilion technicians to focus on the elements of the live system. The Production operations team was in place, trained and ready for live operations in time for the scheduled implementation of the project.

Polar Moment also provided an on-call team that was available to respond immediately to any live issues, ensuring the system remained available to OMV 24hours per day. The team also provided a technical interface between Euronet and Postilion – diagnosing any application-specific problems and communicating them to Postilion, so that appropriate fixes could be provided quickly and efficiently.

Active/Active

In addition to standard operations, Polar Moment provided support in the implementation of a highly complex Postilion Active/ Active configuration, in support of providing extremely high system availability by mirroring transactions between two live data centres on a real-time transaction by transaction basis. By supporting the Postilion Active/Active implementation, Polar Moment helped to ensure that downtime was reduced, thus ensuring very high availability to the end customer.

The Active/ Active configuration provided an effective disaster recovery system, eliminating a major technical risk.

Cross-training of in-house staff

To ensure the continued success of the project, Polar Moment provided training to Euronet’s in-house team so that they could take ownership of their own platform.

Outcome

Polar Moment simplified the roll-out of Euronet’s SEPA-compliant processing platform by providing exceptionally high levels of Postilion expertise and technical knowledge. Building an excellent rapport with OMV and delivering a strong customer focus, Polar Moment helped Euronet to achieve an outstandingly high level of customer satisfaction.

Polar Moment’s consultants were part of the Euronet core team in ensuring that this pioneering Postilion implementation was successful and was one of the first consultancies to provide Euronet with resources for the OMV project. The team has continued to exceed expectations and is now the only provider to still have consultants working on the project today.