2008 InfoWorld CTO 25: George Spies, MasterCard Worldwide

The use of SOA lets IT create a brand-new, flexible debit platform

 

It was a supersecret project in the small word of financial processing: MasterCard Worldwide was building a new debit-processing platform to be used by financial institutions throughout the globe.

And it was up to George Spies to spearhead the technical development. "We didn't want a me-too app," says the senior vice president for debit services, global technology, and operations. Spies saw an opportunity to provide an integrated debit platform, one that not only handled the money but also other processing services such as PINs, signatures and ATM interactions.

[ Discover what insights you can take advantage of from the other 2008 InfoWorld CTO 25 winners. ]

To accomplish this effort -- begun in 2007 and launched publicly in April 2008 -- Spies relied on an SOA approach with a bit of Web 2.0 panache added.

SOA was critical to the integrated approach in several ways. SOA's essentially modular approach meant that the platform itself can be extended in the future without affecting the existing modules. It also means that MasterCard's financial services customers can more easily add their own modules and integrate with other payment providers' systems, yet be managed as a single application from the customer's point of view, Spies says -- all using the same data.

To actually deliver these services, Spies' team had to introduce business scripting logic to the platform, "so we could do something for a specific customer but not have a separate engine." That sounds a lot like the configuration approach of SaaS (software as a service), but it's not: The business scripting logic is meant to test out the functionality in preproduction mode, gaining customer approval before the heavy lifting needed to develop code for a high-transaction environment. Spies' team still develops production code for these unique needs. But because of the SOA approach, the special code is simply treated as a module made available to a specific customer as a regular part of their user interface.

Given the increasing move to cloud computing -- one of the Web 2.0 technologies he is monitoring -- Spies also realized that not all customers would want to run the platform on their own infrastructure, so he delivered the debit platform both as a software package and as SaaS provisioned by MasterCard. "No one knows how things will run in 10 to 15 years, so we wanted both options," he says.

Galen Gruman is executive editor of InfoWorld.