Architecture for Integration of Point of Sale Terminals with Financial Institutions Through Web Services

ARCHITECTURE FOR INTEGRATION OF POINT OF SALE TERMINALS WITH FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS THROUGH WEB SERVICES

ERIK-JAN MONSHOUWER, RAUL VALVERDE University of Liverpool

Concordia University ABSTRACT With the conventional POS payment transaction method, vendors are bound to a payment institute in their region and can only use relatively expensive dedicated or slow dial-up lines to their financial institute. This paper report covers the work to produce an architecture and a prototype that supports Point of Sales terminal payments over the Internet through web services. With the use of web services for payment transactions, vendors will get more freedom to choosing their provider and the services they take without having to throw away their legacy applications. Given the globalization of the economy, vendors can negotiate about services and fees with payment providers all over the world. Literature research and the prototype tests and evaluation in this project shows that transactions fees and performance of POS terminal payments transactions trough web services can be competitive to conventional payment transactions methods and create flexibility for vendors POS terminal application. Vendor’s available Internet connections and the web services standards in the market can be used for payment transactions. With web services the system can be created and changed relatively fast and simple if the right skills are available. Keywords: Pos, Architecture, Financial Institutions, Vendors, Web Services., Transactions Fees 1. INTRODUCTION This research delivers a web service architecture for integration of Point of Sale (POS) terminals with financial institutions. Businesses are interested in the freedom that this may offer because vendors can select payment providers from all over the world to find the best fee and services. With the conventional POS payment transaction method, vendors are bound to a payment institute in their region and can only use relatively expensive...