Intelligent Enterprise

Ubiquitous Utopia

Visa's Sara Garrison on U-commerce

Sara Garrison joined Visa in February 2000, as a senior vice president, Technology Development. She has led the implementation of the new U.S. payments traffic network, Direct Exchange. Prior to joining Visa, Sara was a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

IE: What is Visa Direct Exchange and how does it enable u-commerce (universal commerce)?

GARRISON: Direct Exchange builds on what Visa is today: Visa is the world's largest payments processing system. Globally, it has a billion cardholders, more than 16 million merchants, and more than 21,000 member banks.

We process more than 3,800 messages a second in peak season, and [yearly] our peak increases by around 20 to 30 percent, every three years or so our volumes double.

The analogy we like to use is that if you took all the stock markets in all the world and looked at all the trading conducted on a daily basis, we process that over a coffee break.

Our volumes and our promise of 100 percent availability and reliability was the baseline from which we built Direct Exchange, the new enabling infrastructure for our VisaNet system.

Direct Exchange is the network and replacement system that provides the ability to support ubiquitous processing of payments -- anywhere, anytime, and through any device -- and information services in mixed forms through open technologies in a secured implementation. That's the promise of u-commerce, and open technologies are the means by which we're able to deliver on that promise.

IE: What technologies did you use in Direct Exchange?

GARRISON: In the networking services, we are using IP technology in a secured implementation. That means it's effectively an extranet; it's the world's largest private financial portal. We also used a lot of Cisco gear.

For our messaging, we used BEA Tuxedo. In order to support 100 percent availability, reliability, and assurance, we built what's called a high-availability cluster solution, and that allows for both horizontal and vertical scaling. It means going to more CPU inside the boxes and then going to bigger boxes. That higher availability cluster solution is a combination of Sun servers using BEA's Tuxedo product as the e-commerce glue or the middleware that holds it all together. It's a combination of both the clustering and the peer-to-peer capabilities in IP.

IE: What are some of the value-added benefits of Direct Exchange that you foresee?

GARRISON: With the new Direct Exchange network, we're able to realize the promise of being able to handle all kinds of payments, not just card payments. We're also able to handle information services and analytic services that heretofore couldn't be offered because of the proprietary nature of the dialogs that occurred.

In earlier environments you're dealing with [SNA] networks, which by virtue of what they are, have very proprietary and fixed formats communication. With this IP technology and XML, as well as some of the capabilities we now have, we have a much more flexible way to create the electronic dialog between any two parties.

There are a huge number of value-added services that we can now provide to the banks, to the merchants, and to our consumers. For consumers, we can start to provide more patterning and tracking of information, and likewise for banks, we will be able to provide enhanced services, which can then be further customized to provide a complete picture back to the consumer base.

IE: Is Visa headed in the direction of providing Web services to customers then?

GARRISON: Visa already provides Web services to customers, but Direct Exchange is the enabling infrastructure on which we can drive out more and more multichannel delivery, and one of those channels is the Web; other channels would include instant messaging and the like.

IE: Are most of these transactions still coming from the point-of-sale systems?

GARRISON: Right. Today, our transactions are driven through the card processes, which are basically point-of-sale centric, but tomorrow we believe that we can take in payments from a multitude of devices. Point of sale will be one.

IE: How important are some of the vertical industry e-commerce standards for customers of this architecture? You mentioned XML. Are there any other standards that you're looking at like BizTalk or RosettaNet?

GARRISON: Well, we'll be able to support multiple standards in our new environment so the question will be what that vertical business space needs.

IE: Does Direct Exchange interface with supply chain management systems?

GARRISON: My answer is that it all depends. To the extent you have supply chain or business-to-business management to leverage one or more components of our solution set, we can tailor those components to meet your needs.

IE: Is Direct Exchange always handled as a purely separate system or can it be integrated right into a customer's application?

GARRISON: Well Direct Exchange is an enabling infrastructure. Logically it can be integrated. Because we secure that network and ensure that it's a private secured environment, it doesn't become physically integrated.

IE: If you have an e-commerce application running on a company's portal, would there be a Visa button to speed up the transaction or will customers continue to go to a separate form?

GARRISON: We are very interested in providing an integrated presentation layer. We're very interested in providing seamless integration of payments and information and purchasing services.

IE: Now that Direct Exchange is in place, what services are you planning to offer?

GARRISON: There's a lot of work going on with SmartCards, but we're also looking at ways in which we can provide enhanced automated services for back-office functions. And one of the things we've been aggressively moving forward with is our back-office chargeback adjustment capabilities. Back office is a huge resource hog, and back-office functions include invoicing, accounting, billing, charge back or adjustments, and things of that ilk. To the extent those can be automated, there are huge efficiency gains, and so that's been a targeted area for us as an early product set over Direct Exchange but it's at the member bank's request.

IE: Going forward, what role do you really see the financial services sector taking in e-commerce? Do you see any trends or emerging stances?

GARRISON: The process of making money, the sequence by which goods or services are exchanged for payment, those underlying processes don't change in the e-commerce space. That underlying [business] paradigm is still there, and in that paradigm, banks, whether physical or virtual, play a very critical role because they are the holders of the account.

In the virtual space, I believe the banks are going to have a critical role to play in the [payment] settlement processes and in the movement of funds, and Visa as the largest clearing engine in the world will [be involved] regardless of the source of those payments.

IE: What advice do you have for IT managers who face the same scaling challenges as Visa?

GARRISON: In the application of new technology to business functions, you still have to maintain the same rigor in your standards for performance in your approach to requirements and capabilities. You still have to maintain complete failover provisions, the ability to ensure redundancy in your systems, rigor in your methodologies and your processes, procedures, and design approaches. You can't throw out all the good things we learned over the years about how to do it right just because it's new.

IE: Is there any advice that you would give to IT managers that are dealing with the new mobile commerce?

GARRISON: I think [mobile commerce] needs to be on the radar screen, but I don't think we've reached in the U.S. the level of maturity we're going to need in terms of protocols, formats, and acceptance for wide-scale deployment.

IE: What is the strategy of this Direct Exchange?

GARRISON: This whole strategy comes about to facilitate new opportunities for our member banks and ultimately meet growing consumer demand for more control over how you pay, what you pay, when you pay, and where you pay.