All Connected, Connected2All

Transaction Network Services said in April that it had launched a new global message service that helps the firm’s clients — from merchants to gateway firms – speed time to transactions and also save time and money in certification across different platforms.

That streamlined processes across the TNSConnect2All offering mean that flexibility is key, in fact connecting all of these far-flung links in the payments chain across a single interface, leveraging the company’s presence across 400 card schemes and banks stretching across 60 countries.

In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Tiffany Trent-Abram, Vice President of Global Product Management of TNS, said that the movement toward central points of connectivity are important to both her firm and its clients for “a couple of reasons. When you talk about growing across the globe, and all the various partners, first there is always … something that needs to be converted. We ran into the same thing as we were developing some of our own products … and we quickly realized we were writing to the same platforms that we had written to another product.”

With that discovery, said Trent-Abram, the TNS development team proposed re-using the code and specifications as the backbone to a single specification that can be used for better integration, across multiple acquirers and merchants, especially with an eye on integration of new terminals. The ability to translate messages across several links in the payments chain of command without needing to write to multiple individual processor formats or protocols.

The most notable impact of a single point of reference for communication, especially in adding to new platforms, said Trent-Abram, rests with “saving weeks, if not months, of effort … there is no rewrite,” which benefits the “creators of new tablets and technologies that can get to market sooner.”

Early interest, said the executive, comes from ISOs seeking to gain access to multiple platform markets with haste. Certification processes are compressed in terms of time and effort, such as those tied to EMV, and while the onus is on the firm to go through the process and make sure the moving pieces are in place, “the development time to that host is dramatically reduced, adding other layers of security such as tokenization or encryption are as simple as adding files and formatting through TNS, and such offerings would in turn boost the security of transactions, no matter the form of acceptance.”