NTT Data/CAFIS

NTT Data/CAFIS is Japan's largest payment processor, handling more than 80% of Japan's credit and debit transactions, with plans to expand its geographical reach into new markets in other countries.

Challenge

• The company's 30-year-old legacy system architecture hindered it from integrating with networks in other markets, effectively slowing its expansion plans.
• The company needed to develop and introduce new services very quickly on a flexible transaction processing system.
• The company processed more than 1.2 billion transactions per year, and transaction volume was increasing 20% per year; it needed to scale to process the increased volume, with 24 x7 reliability.
• CAFIS mandated that there be "no loss of transactions" to customers.

Kabira Solution: Kabira Financial Payment Switch™

• NTT Data/CAFIS implemented the Kabira Financial Payment Switch as a "gateway" that allowed CAFIS to accept card transactions originating from overseas markets while leveraging its existing legacy payment infrastructure for core processing.
• CAFIS was able to guarantee "no loss of transactions," including transactions in-flight, by implementing Kabira's Highly Available solution — without necessitating the addition of hardware clusters or external databases to ensure availability.
• Kabira helped CAFIS migrate away from an expensive, inflexible system to much lower-cost, Solaris-based commodity hardware.
• Kabira's SOA-compliant and Business Processing Modeling (BPM) development environment enabled the company to very quickly design services of higher quality and more stability and the company shifted development in-house to save outsourcing costs.

Results

NTT Data/CAFIS has expanded its business into international markets as intended. With Kabira, CAFIS reduced its total cost of ownership by switching over to running its infrastructure on low-cost commodity hardware. Kabira lets CAFIS achieve 24/7 availability without the addition of complex clustered hardware. Kabira has enabled NTT Data/CAFIS to reduce development and overhead costs by bringing development and system maintenance in-house. CAFIS also reduced the resources needed to produce new services and increased engineering productivity.

CAFIS has vastly improved time-to-market, speeding development of new services and reaching superior Proof-of-Concept in only three weeks, compared to five months.