A Closer Look at the People, Process, and Technology of Payment Processing
The Finance - Billing team leads the Payment Processing domain. Operations and IT are also closely connected with this very focused domain.
ATG maintains a set of 75 key business processes to support management of Customers and Revenue for Service Providers. Twelve of these processes originate, or are impacted by, the Credit Card Processing domain. Below are the key processes that touch this domain, categorized by the Organizational Unit that owns the process:
Finance - Billing Organization
Billing Setup Process - Tasks and functions associated with setting up the billing processes for given products and services.
Billing/Invoice Processing: Recurring/Periodic - Process for aggregating financial activities and adjustments for a given billing period and generating respective invoice.
Credit Card Optimization - The optimization of credit card success in order to reduce processing cost, risk, and fraud, as well as lower transaction fees.
Credit Card Processing - Methods to receive credit card payments including authorization, payment gateway, processing, interchange, and credit card success.
Operations Organization
Pro-Active Customer Notification - Operations focus (CC expiry, notification of payment received) - A proactive approach to notify customers of pertinent payment information.
I.T.
Maintenance and Oversight of Monetization Ecosystem - processes around ensuring that all touch points and connections within the ecosystem are optimized to their fullest potential.
Monitoring & Testing of Vendor Functional Releases - As ecosystem components release updates and patches, each is checked and tested to confirm all systems are working together as required by the business' requirements.
Vendor Management of Monetization Ecosystem - oversight and communication duties of ecosystem software components and their vendors, including management of vendor road map and change logs and general relationship nurturing.
Cross-Training of Monetization Ecosystem Components - process for training organizational resources on the appropriate software systems.
Security Oversight of Monetization Ecosystem - process for maintaining and controlling access and permissions to ecosystem components.
Data Stewardship Across Monetization Ecosystem - process of assigning ownership and sources of truth for data within the organization.
All Organizations
Daily, Periodic, or Ad Hoc Reporting (Extraction, Load, Report, Dashboard)- movement of data between domains to create single source of truth for reporting and dashboarding.
Payment Processing software is provided by a handful of companies that ensure a secure, encrypted connection to their system, and typically have tiered fraud filtering systems as an upgrade path.