Credit Card Processing

Success Story

Challenge:

The credit card company uncovered limitations in its critical clearing and settlement application during the 1980s. At the time, its mission-critical clearing and settlement application was processing 100,000,000 transactions a day, representing billions of dollars from transactions made in numerous countries around the world. Every morning at 3:00 a.m. Pacific Time, the systems cleared and settled all these transactions and wired money around the world. Without a doubt, software reliability was crucial to operations.

A significant limitation of application processing soon became evident. Each time a change was made to handle unique customer needs, all other customers were inadvertently affected. This posed a challenge: the credit card company needed the ability to process unique transactions very quickly.

This limitation caused the credit card company’s IT organization to determine that a table-driven approach would enable the application to be tailored easily, thus meeting the differing needs of a variety of customers without affecting all customers.