Retailers moving toward enterprise payment systems, expert says

Multi-brand, multi-channel retailers are moving away from operating with several individual payment systems and toward a single enterprise system that improves control of payment data, increasing accuracy, security and data-access speed, says Dave Glaser, vice president of professional services for CyberSource Corp., a provider of payment processing and risk management software and services.

The biggest incentive pushing retailers toward enterprise payment systems is the desire to increase security and more easily comply with the credit card industry’s new PCI data security standards, but the biggest return on investment is through having a streamlined payment system that can operate with less staff and less redundancy in technology, Glaser says. “Security is the main reason many retailers are doing this or have it on their radar screens, but the ROI comes from streamlining data processing and support staff,” he says, adding that CyberSource is seeing a rising interest in enterprise payment systems from retailers that do $25 million and up in annual revenue.

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Many retailers have operated with separate payment systems that were built as merchants expanded into new selling channels and brand divisions, or that were absorbed through their acquisition of other companies, Glaser says. But until recently, most retailers had not seen a need to combine their payment silos into a single enterprise system, he adds. “It wasn’t mission critical,” he says.

But the increased concern in recent years over payment transaction data security has led more retailers to migrate to enterprise systems that provide consistency in payment processing from the point of purchase through transaction authorization and settlement with banks, Glaser says. For example, an enterprise system streamlines how credit and debit card transactions are accepted, screened for potential fraud, and forwarded to third-party payment processors.

Migrating to an enterprise system is usually done in steps, starting with one brand or channel at a time, Glaser says. Retailers can deploy the enterprise systems using a mixture of in-house technology, middleware software from companies like IBM Corp. or BEA Systems Inc., and hosted applications from CyberSource and other companies, he adds.