iPayments Or Oracle Payments

iPayments Or Oracle Payments:
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Oracle iPayments in 11i is renamed to Oracle Payments in R12.

Oracle Payments is also part of the Oracle eBusiness suite and will serve as the 
Funds capture(AR) and Funds disbursement(AP) engine for other Oracle applications(i.e AP/AR etc).

EC Applications are eCommerce applications.

The major functional components of the core Payments Engine are
    Multi-Payment Method Support : This means whether iPayments can handle credit card/debit 
  card etc. iPayment handles this thru routing.
    Routing : Routing basically indicates that for each payment method,what payment processor 
 should be contacted, for ex, for credit card you can have paymentech and for bank 
 accounts, you can have paypal. And further, for visa payments paypal, discover 
 cybersource etc. those routing rules are defined by the iPayment administrator.
    Risk Management : This includes defining the risk factors which can be increased if you implement
 AR as well. 
    Security : have a trusted list of hosts in your environment and only auth requests 
 coming as part of that trusted list will be accepted and the rest will be denied. 
 The credit card, purchase card, bank account info are encrypted in the database. 
    
Payment systems is another word that is used analogous to payment processors.

A Payment Processor is a service which interacts directly with the Issuer Banks 
and Card Institutions (i.e Visa, Mastercard, American Express) to process financial 
transactions. 
Basically what payment processors do is that they take an authorization request (from 
a merchant or payment gateway) consisting of basic credit card information like zip, 
card#, cvc code and see if it is a Visa, Master, Amex etc and then route it to the 
appropriate network. They also check with the Issuer bank, about the balance of the account. 

 American express 3 ,
 Visa cards always start with 4,
 Master card start with 5, 
 Discover cards start with 6 etc 

Examples of Payment processors are Paymentech, cybercash, citibank, first data north etc.

A Payment Gateway is a Service Provider which acts as an intermediary between Merchant 
and Payment Processor.  A Payment Gateway protects the credit card details encrypting 
the credit card numbers etc and ensures that information passes securely between the 
Merchant and Payment Processor (as well as Merchant and the Customer or Payer). A 
Payment Gateway authorizes the transaction by passing the Authorization requests to
 the Payment Processor and getting the results back.

There are different types of payment choices available for the customer and they are
    Credit Card
    Pin-less Debit Card
    Purchase Card / Corporate / Procurement Card

Usually a Credit Card transaction goes through 3 phases and they are 
    Authorization
    Settlement
    Reconciliation

Authorization is a process where the payment processor will check with the database of 
the Card Issuer for the availability of the Credit to cover the transaction. If so, 
then the funds are reserved and an authorization code is returned to the payment processor.

Settlement is a process which happens when the order is shipped ,and the funds (that 
were authorized earlier) are captured. The settlement transactions consist of multiple 
types of transactions like 
    Capture, 
    Void, 
    Return,
    Close Batch Functions
 
Reconciliation : Acquiring bank sends daily,weekly reports to the Payee (i.e Merchant) 
and the Payee will reconcile those statements with his local database. 

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There are two kinds of Payment systems.

Gateway-Model Payment System
Processor-Model payment System.

Gateway Model : Low volume, per transaction fees,online trx(auth,settlement), easy setup.
Processor Model : high volume, no per trx fees,online auth, batch (settlement), more rigorous security/conn



Inbound Bank Account Remittance


QUESTIONNAIRE :
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1). Does Paymentec accept both online/offline transactions ?
No. paymentec only accepts batch transactions for processing/authorization etc. 

2). What happened to oracle ipayments in 11i ?
Oracle iPayments in 11i is renamed to Oracle Payments in R12.

3). Some times some websites will do two times credit card authorizations and the 
 auth amount is different in those cases, why ?
Typically let us say when a customer comes to a website enters his credit card 
and purchases some thing, valued $500. At that point, the site might authorize the 
credit card with ,say , paypal for only a $1 check. That means this check only 
involves whether that credit card is a valid credit card or not. it is not checking 
the balance on that card. it could be that the balance on that credit card is $200 
or it could be $2000.
And later when they fulfill that order i.e when they physically ship that order, 
they will do the actual capture of funds. But if the time lag between initial auth 
and this capture is lot then the companies do the auth process again and then 
do the capture.  

4). What about the low value authorizations ??
Typically ZDA (zero dollar autho) or $1 authorizations have the following advantages.
    They are fast and immediate ,because you are not checking for the total balance amount existence etc
    They are inexpensive as compared to full amount auth.  

Hence typically they are used, when you have to do auth two times. Or if you have 
to authorize two times, then it makes sense to initially do the auth for a smaller 
amount and at then at the time of fulfillment, the full amount authorization. 


5). What are the different ways of implementing iPayment/Payments?

Implementations differ by the following parameters;

At what stage the ipayments is invoked :: booking,fulfilment,invoicing.
Front end at UI / backend at backoffice erp.


6). There are 3 types of ipayment servlets available?
   Look for the powerpoint presentation available which explains this. 

7). What are the major functional components of the core Payments Engine ?

    Multi-Payment Method Support : This means whether iPayments can handle credit card/debit 
  card etc. iPayment handles this thru routing.
    Routing : Routing basically indicates that for each payment method,what payment processor 
 should be contacted, for ex, for credit card you can have paymentech and for bank 
 accounts, you can have paypal. And further, for visa payments paypal, discover 
 cybersource etc. those routing rules are defined by the iPayment administrator.
    Risk Management : This includes defining the risk factors which can be increased if you implement
 AR as well. 
    Security : have a trusted list of hosts in your environment and only auth requests 
 coming as part of that trusted list will be accepted and the rest will be denied. 
 The credit card, purchase card, bank account info are encrypted in the database. 

8). What are the risk factors?
 Basically risk factors are the factors that you define in iPayments like
  the time of the payment
  amount of the payment etc.
 Once this is done, the applicaiton will check for every transaction, whether 
 these factors are satisfied and will take necessary action. 

9). What are the additional risk factors that are available in AR as well ?
 If the customer implements AR as well as ipayments, then he will have more risk
 factors as you can define risk factors in AR as well and so can have more 
 power and security.

10). what is a payee in Oracle Payments ?
 Let us say if a company is implementing iPayments,then that company will be the Payee.
 However typically a company can be having multiple business units doing businesses,
 like sales,marketing, HR etc. So we can define that business unit as a Payee.
 
11). What is payment process profile ?
    A payment process profile could be a funds capture process profile or
 funds disbursement process profile.Basically a funds capture process profile tells 
 what is the outbound file format and the inbound file format etc.

12). Does iPayments allow the functionality of having multiple payment processors ?
The steps to test out whether multiple payment processors functionality is allowed in iPayments or not ?

    Create a Payee ;a code and name;
    Create a payment system,say, "Paymentech" and set the processing type as "Credit Card"
            create a payee account on this payment system as well.
    Create a payment system ,say,"Cybersource" and set the processing type as "Debit Card"
            create a payee account on this payment system as well.
    Update the Payee with the above created payment system accounts from two different payment systems.
    Create a funds capture process profile for both the payment systems :
            Basically a funds capture process profile tells what is the outbound file 
  format and the inbound file format etc.
    Update the Payee with the different payment system accounts corresponding to different payment methods.
        For ex;; for credit card  =>  (payment system 1 : account 1),funds capture profile 1
                 for debit card   =>  (payment system 2: account 2),funds capture profile 2
         What this means is that,for different payment methods,it will try to use different payment processors.