Automation of Credit Card Transactions with MessagePlus/Open

In times where much talk is of secure online transactions, the next generation Internet applications and Webservices it is amazing to see how frequently fax continues to be used for business communications. One example of this phenomenon is in the processing of credit card transactions – in particular where many branches of banks communicate with a service provider. For card applications, cancellations, blocking of cards and many other transactions it is not at all unusual to see the issuing bank fill out a paper form and send it via facsimile to the service provider.

Then in many cases the received fax pages are printed, manually sorted according to  transaction type, issuing bank, region and other criteria and distributed, again manually, to operators who finally type all relevant data into back office systems.

CardProcess GmbH, a company handling 3 million credit cards for the Cooperative Banking Group in Germany, recently undertook a major project to accelerate this laborious process and to make it much more secure and cost efficient. Facsimiles are now received and stored electronically; all relevant data is extracted from the images automatically by optical character recognition (OCR), forwarded to a workflow management system and finally safely stored on non erasable media meeting all compliance regulations.

“With MessagePlus/Open we have a powerful tool which really streamlined, automated and secured the former manual work processes to a very high degree. Currently we process some 36,000 transactions per month without problems and the solution is perfectly adopted to our specific business needs” states Patrick Lenz, the responsible project manager with CardProcess.

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