A Major Credit Card Processor

Overview

This financial services organization is one of the larger credit card processing companies in the U.S., employing over 10,000 employees and managing total assets of over $7 billion. This company launched its primary global credit card processing application in 1989 and today, it runs on a 150,000 MPS IBM z Series mainframe.

A large percentage of employees maintain this legacy system, contributing to the ever-spiraling mainframe costs. In addition, start-up credit card processing organizations running high-performance, inexpensive cloud-based applications are disrupting the industry by offering better pricing. This credit card processer realized that it needed to reduce its reliance on mainframe operations in order to lower costs, improve IT agility, and maintain its competitive position.

The Challenge

Since the company began offering online and mobile credit card processing to issuers, merchants, and consumers, the influx of inquiry packets generated from this service now consumes ever-increasing mainframe computing power, driving costs even higher.

To lower costs and modernize IT operations, this organization chose Astadia to develop a Proof of Concept (POC) to demonstrate how well an on premise distributed solution can manage credit card processing inquiry packets without impacting response time and customer service.

The Solution

The organization considered three POC options: replatform, refactor, or rewrite the mainframe application and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution. As part of the POC, Astadia replatformed the mainframe workload using Oracle ART and Visual COBOL and refactored CICS with Oracle Tuxedo.

The POC proved successful, demonstrating that a cloud-based platform is only a few milliseconds slower than the mainframe. In addition, customer transactions are updated in near real-time since mainframe batch processing is eliminated.

Results

The POC demonstrated that this organization can realize the following benefits by modernizing its mainframe environment:

• Reduce IT costs without impacting system performance and service to customers
• Competitively price services without impacting margins to disrupt and disrupters and strengthen the company’s position in the marketplace
• Provide an agile platform that speeds up development and enables the organization to leverage modern technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
• Improve the customer experience by posting transactions in near real-time