Agent Based Model for Payment Systems Integration

Abstract

In East Africa and Africa in general, we have several innovations in the payments processing sector that are each aimed at solving a critical business function. Currently, we have payment systems such as mobile payment systems from Telco providers, instant remittance systems, card based payment systems from banks, Electronic Funds Transfer systems and Real Time Gross Settlement systems. Each type of payment systems has its own standards and protocols for integration to client facing applications. Mobile payment systems use telecommunication protocols such as: GSM, SMPP, CDMA, GPRS, and microwave. Card based systems use protocols meant for secure card payments such as: magnetic strip cards and smart/chip cards. Electronic Funds Transfer use interchange specification formats that are based on ISO 8583 standards. To tackle the issue of incompatibilities among the above diverse protocols, this paper explores an agent-based model for coordination and its impact in unifying payments from various industries. In this paper, an agent-based model for coordination is designed and an illustration on how to use open source tools such as: jPOS, Java and XML to implement such models.