Distra Switch provides reliable and secure management of transaction flow throughout the entire payments lifecycle, managed internally by easily configured and adapted objects known as Transaction Sessions.
Transaction Sessions manage the complete end-to-end messaging dialogue of all parties participating in a transaction and are reliably persisted within the Switch Database, so even under failure scenarios the transaction remains consistent, durable and reliable.
Transaction Sessions are transient and perform a variety of processing activities, including:
- Coordination of messages to and from multiple external systems
- Scheduling of timers and handling of events
- Invocation of business processing rules selected by the type and context of the transactions
- Interaction with authorisation systems
- Integration with external fraud and AML systems
- Absolute reliability by ensuring all transaction activity is check-pointed and persistently written
Sessions may be invoked after the transaction where additional processing is required, for example where an adjustment or cancellation must be made to a payment, sufficient information is present in the restored session to be able to complete the operation.
Error conditions are also well catered for, with the Transactions Sessions following the tried and tested two-phase-commit (TPC) pattern. This allows the session to manage multiple dialogues with external systems and enabling the reliable and consistent recovery arising from error conditions such as host system timeouts and the like.
Distra Switch provides a number of pre-built transaction sessions which cater for the:
- Retail payments such eComm, ATM, POS
- Standing Orders, Direct Debits
- Administrative
- Multi-party - e.g bill payments, Transfers
Transaction Sessions are declaratively defined using XML like many other component based architectures. Customisation for the session is simple. The component framework model means that most changes are limited to simple configuration of the XML.
Sessions are also independent of endpoints so it is easy to develop new payment types spanning across the different channels very easily and rapidly.
These features and flexibility provide for simple yet rapid convergence and services and payments channels on the one platform.