Info 202 Fall 2011

Pushed by rapidly developing business customers and enabled by information technologies, payment processing has evolved from the exchange of physical money to a swipe of credit card, and now to a state where multiple players share a piece of the pie. They include Internet companies like Google, phone companies like the abovementioned, credit card companies such as Visa (per the same Bloomberg article, Visa is creating its own mobile-payment device while supporting Isis), and specialized payment companies like Paypal and Square. Because they can! The flexible, service oriented architecture in modern banking systems (L1 R9) technically enable such evolution. To tie back to the understanding of organizing systems (OS), payment processing is essentially such a system where the payer, the recipient, and the payment are the “resources”, and the transfer of money is one of the many “interactions” supported. The transactional processes behind such an OS will automatically help process payments, but implemented on a handheld device that follows and identifies a customer, the system will also be able to do more than that; for example, Isis is designed to also help marketers send coupons to customers’ mobile devices for a fee. Compared with credit cards, this extends “what is being organized” by the former.