PROGNOSIS helps EVERTEC empower business innovation for its customers

As part of the Popular, Inc’s. financial services conglomerate that has been operating for 113 years, EVERTEC operates the ATH Network that has been running POS and ATMs in Puerto Rico, The US Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and El Salvador for the last 22 years. EVERTEC was created in 2004 to provide transaction switching, merchant processing services, business solutions and check and payment processing. Today, EVERTEC operates the most extensive network of ATM and POS terminals in the Caribbean Basin region. With offices in 7 cities, EVERTEC’s information technology service portfolio is vital to government agencies, universities and industries including banking, education, telecommunications and insurance.

The big switching business

The ATH network provides ATM and POS transaction services to domestic and international markets, processing and authorizing over 35 million transactions per month, allowing financial institutions to interconnect and process cards across 4,400 ATMS and over 84,000 POS devices. EVERTEC provides electronic transaction services for close to 2,000 clients in 14 countries including Venezuela, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Dominica, Belize, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Honduras.

The ATH network represents about 56% of all ATMs currently operating in Puerto Rico. Jorge Hernández, Senior Vice President of the ATH Network explains “We handle millions of transactions everyday for our customers who demand new and better services. Therefore, it is vital for us to monitor our transactions and do all we can improve our capacity of providing the service our clients are expecting.”

With the help of Australian-developed PROGNOSIS performance monitoring software, EVERTEC is using transaction surveillance to monitor approximately 2.3 million transactions every day. This ensures reliability, efficiency and optimization of the ATH network and the services it provides.

Gil Horta, Vice President of Computer and Network Operations says “the use of PROGNOSIS has enabled us to identify problems quickly; problems such as non-active ATMs and trends in transaction denials. The ability to react quickly to these situations has helped us improve the quality of our service and differentiate us from other providers.”

In particular, using PROGNOSIS to uncover a specific suspect or a failed ATM or POS transaction within millions processed, delivers great benefits to EVERTEC’s productivity. Without this type of proactive transaction monitoring the only alternative was to try and obtain these transaction details from volumes of data trapped in log files.

While information processing is EVERTEC’s core business, it also offers a very diverse range of services to multinational companies in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Business process outsourcing, business continuity provision, consulting, electronic ticketing, printing and distribution services are offered to meet the demands of a market increasingly dependent upon information technology.

Transaction availability and integrity

Transaction availability, integrity and excellent response times are key elements involved in EVERTEC’s delivery of transaction processing and business solutions 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Intangible losses such as customer dissatisfaction when card holders cannot conduct a transaction at the ATM, or merchants cannot process electronic transactions, can go undetected. In these situations transaction intelligence gives EVERTEC insight at all times and enables them to respond proactively to any situation.

Horta explains how important it is to anticipate problems based on prior experiences. Referring to a situation that could affect ATM networks worldwide, where customers insert their cards into an ATM to commence the transaction, but nothing happens he says, “We now have the ability to identify certain situations that can help us improve ATM availability.” To this, Hernandez adds: “Implementing a monitoring screen to find ATMs with no recent transactions has helped improve ATM availability by identifying these inactive machines. We can identify a suspected non active ATM allowing a reload to be sent to recover the ATM and minimize customer inconvenience. This simple operation has helped us improve ATM availability”

EVERTEC monitors key systems in real time, allowing them to identify any issues that occur and to react quickly to solve them. Horta explains “users demand high availability for the services, and real time monitoring helps us provide that availability. In our changing environment, flexibility in everything we do is important. The tools and applications we use need to have the necessary flexibility to keep up with the changes that our clients demand.”

Setting benchmarks

Recognizing that issues and problems do arise, Hernandez says “certainly, with PROGNOSIS we have improved the reliability of our transaction processing because we are monitoring the performance of the transactions online as they are processed. In terms of transaction efficiency, we are monitoring transaction response times in order to identify when a issuer is having or may have problems. For these conditions, we have developed thresholds within the tool that generate alarms which are sent to a centralized event manager.”

Creating thresholds to detect degrading situations and collecting data over specific time periods provides historic trend analysis allowing EVERTEC to observe and respond to ATM transaction results, real-time ATM transaction trends and interchange response times. This enables EVERTEC to manage its environment proactively so it can react before issues turn into problems.
An example of the importance of creating thresholds to alert to problems is monitoring and managing stand-in activity.

Understanding trends in stand-ins allows each institution to minimize its exposure to risk. Identifying the number of stand-in transactions over time, the relevant stand-in institutions, and when to escalate excess stand-in quantities is critical. EVERTEC has created a secure web based facility for its clients so they can gain transaction intelligence from their online transactions.

Transaction surveillance

Using efficient pattern-matching techniques, each transaction is monitored and analyzed. When a problem or suspicious transaction occurs, an exception is created and automatically conveyed to the relevant business group via a centralized event manager for immediate action.

EVERTEC has created customized ATM and POS monitoring screens to capture transaction exceptions such as stand-ins, excessive denials or bad response codes. Transaction surveillance has allowed EVERTEC to deploy its staff to other areas, freeing up valuable resources from the time consuming and laborious tasks of searching and analyzing historical data.

EVERTEC uses transaction surveillance to capture transactions for a specific card in both the POS and ATM environments. Analyzing this information can identify a transaction that is reporting a particular condition.

Transactions can be captured based on card number, card issuer, acquirer, logical network, and response or return codes. Particularly useful is the ability to set these thresholds for a specific ATM or POS terminal. This can reduce the time taken to resolve a problem because proactive monitoring alerts operators when the situation occurs rather than having to watch for it to happen and respond after the event.

These transactions can be broken down by financial institution ID and combinations of many other factors to uncover the exact nature of problem transactions and to determine who is being affected. Horta adds “Identifying real-time ATM transaction trends by monitoring the number of approved and denied transactions across the ATM network gives us the ability to react quickly and improve the quality of our service.” Furthermore we have a great deal of information regarding the nature of ATM and POS transaction processing. We use this information to produce reports that help our clients make placement decisions for new ATMs in any particular location by identifying transaction volumes and transaction trends. Reports are also generated on ATM and POS issuer and acquirer transactions and denials by logical network.”

EVERTEC uses PROGNOSIS to monitor total POS transactions and interchange response times in real time. This allows them to break down response times into components for detailed analysis. Slow response times can be interrogated to determine whether the cause is a local problem, or a slow responding institution.

Unique and dynamic information transaction solutions

Deep insight into its transaction processing environment allows EVERTEC to offer value added services to merchants, card holders, banks and financial institutions, providing them with transaction processing intelligence that they could not get by any other means.

An important consideration for EVERTEC is that the information they use is retrieved based on certain rules and conditions, ensuring that database collections are efficient and only contain relevant data.

ATM optimization and innovation is key to EVERTEC’s expansion of transaction processing services throughout the Americas. It follows that to grow its business, EVERTEC must provide a highly available, reliable and innovative transaction switch to entice and retain new customers.

Effective problem management

Monitoring and maintaining EVERTEC’s vast, diverse and complex technological infrastructure is pivotal to its business. EVERTEC’s computer and telecommunications center uses an ultra modern network linked by satellite, fiber optic, microwave, and land lines to contact local and international clients, and reach and support their communication networks.

Managing such a vast processing system requires a centralized, flexible management strategy. Messages from all monitoring tools used by EVERTEC are consolidated. The event manager then executes specific functions based on rules defined in it. This brings benefits of speed, integrity and accuracy providing an audit trail of all generated alerts.

How PROGNOSIS helps EVERTEC

PROGNOSIS helps EVERTEC improve availability of its ATM and POS network by providing smart transaction monitoring functions and detailed problem reporting. Transaction analysis allows EVERTEC to be innovative in providing delivery of ATM and POS services to its customers and supports growth in transaction processing, as well as new transaction types.

PROGNOSIS enables insight into transactions in EVERTEC’s highly secure environment providing information on denials, stand-in activity, response times and percentage of approved transactions. Business views include summaries of ATM status and transactions by region and institution, and summaries of cash dispensed.

By creating trend based historical analysis EVERTEC can analyze the usage and experience of its customers, to develop new opportunities for the future.