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Payment system implementations
Written by Susan
March 30, 2026
Implementing a payment system is a huge undertaking. In the 90’s we put payment systems into banks to ensure card transactions could be approved 24/7.
Bank back-end hosts were typically not available 24/7, usually requiring batch processing for a significant chunk of the overnight window. In NZ with ATMs only, I guess some downtime seemed acceptable in the early wee hours.
But with the introduction of EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer Point of Sale) in NZ initially at Shell petrol stations in 1985 using BNZ debit cards, and later with the formation of ETSL (Electronic Transaction Services Ltd) with all four major banks, it became critical to ensure transaction authorization was continuously available.
With EFTPOS arriving in NZ, downtime would never be acceptable. So, payment systems were put in front of and connected to bank back-end systems. Back-end systems still authorized the transaction, but this setup meant that when back-end systems were down for overnight processing, scheduled maintenance or unscheduled outages, the front-end payment system could stand in and authorize the transaction on its behalf. These front-end switches had already been put into financial institutions in the U.K. to solve the same downtime issues. They are mission-critical systems and designed to be available 100% of the time. Scheduled downtime for deployments on these systems needs to be handled with an active-active environment where one application node continues to operate whilst the other one is updated.
10 Steps
Fast forward to today. The legacy payment systems we typically see in many of the banks are due for an overhaul. Some of the reasons for this are cost, old technology, end of life products, downtime, heavy customization and complexity.
To succeed with a payment system modernization the following list of 10 in my experience count:
- Business architecture and design of a payment platform or product which leads to choosing the right payment switch vendor
- Having good Executive support
- Good business engagement and ownership – the business rules should be set and understood by the business and maintained by the business
- The right resourcing on the project – leadership and team members with experience in payments – a cohesive team unit – project, business, technical, engineering, test, scheme, infrastructure
- Test transaction simulation – configured with the production transaction set, full transaction set baseline output results to compare against
- A payment system code delivery plan based on bank migration strategy with system deliverables delivered on time and of good quality
- Project plan with work, milestones and schedule of deliveries nailed down, regularly communicated and adhered to, scheme/partner project timings and test certification/end-to-end testing windows are confirmed and built into the plan, environment planning, test data and keys are created, configured and shared
- Good vendor relationships – raising defects, defining requirements, good bug fix rate, fast response times, clear SLAs, regular release cycles
- Good process around each of the practices and the project itself to ensure dates are met, documentation is shared, reporting is provided, project alignment, team building.
- Production deployment – implementation and migration planning, production keys shared, training staff on how to use, manage and monitor the new platform, good robust DR switch redundancy that is frequently tested in production
This is not the end of the story. Often the business rules are complex and underestimated. Also, best laid plans can be disrupted due to a change in Executive priorities, production issues, time delays, and other unexpected system priorities (like disaster recovery tests, hardware upgrades). There are many moving parts in these types of transformation projects and this means project members need to be adaptable realizing that when things don’t go to plan, adjustments need to be made, work arounds need to be done, and new strategies need to be found. A good big picture understanding by the leadership, working together as a team to pivot, a great vendor and solid processes will help to maintain project stability.
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