RedLink

Red Link is the biggest transactional switch in Argentina, processing transactions from ATMs and digital wallets. Red Link is owned by a group of public and private banks that service most of Argentina’s population. Red Link processes more than 47 million transactions per day during their peak time of year. They are interconnected with 60 financial institutions and have more than 1,000 employees, with a large team focused on the HPE NonStop, as it is the primary system used for their transactions.

This customer success story is told by Gustavo Martinez, NonStop Engineering Head at Red Link S.A., and highlights how he has worked with the teams inside Red Link to integrate their HPE NonStop utilizing the LightWave solutions with multiple use cases throughout their enterprise.

We are focused primarily in the debit business, although we are beginning to work in other financial areas such as the payment industry, including the processing of credit card transactions and real-time payments, amongst others.

I have been working for Red Link for more than 20 years and have a diverse background in technical and team management roles, all of which have been related to Red Link’s core business on the HPE NonStop and ACI’s BASE24 solution. Currently, I am in charge of the Core Platform Engineering team (including additional frameworks such as UPF). My team works in conjunction with the Innovation Laboratory, the BASE24 development department, the architecture team, and other OSS-based departments that need access to resources hosted within the Core NonStop platform. These services encompass simple reads from BASE24 files or other NonStop-hosted applications, all the way to complex processes that require the development of additional NonStop applications based on Pathway or BASE24 satellite processes in order to interact with the online transaction processing (OLTP) stream.

Around 2017, we had the need to begin to expose Web services. We had experience with HPE NonStop SOAP and that is what we started using, which is still in use today for some services. With younger engineers joining the Red Link team, global trends favoring REST adoption, and the internal decision to adopt REST as the corporate web architecture, the need to explore REST services on NonStop became clear.

That is how we contacted NuWave Technologies, meeting them at a HPE NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) in California.

In the same year and for the next couple of years, we ran several POCs with LightWave Server™ and LightWave Client™. The results of the projects were documented and shared internally with Red Link’s technical groups. These tests also included stress tests to verify the products’ robustness and resilience.

Some of these proofs of concept carried out in those years are shown within the graphics below:

This idea allowed us to understand the code reusability from existing Pathway servers or to create simple servers. By following existing interfaces (IPMs), we can integrate to the backend with SOAP or REST.

The challenge was to develop integration between LightWave Server™ and XPNET through a process developed by Red Link. This would be used when access to the XPNET ecosystem was required. It is important to mention that this development is not always required; it depends on requirements and function analysis from BASE24 users and the NonStop platform.

This proof of concept allowed us to know which programming considerations were required to interact within LightWave Client™ and a BASE24 satellite process. This proof of concept was the base that would eventually become the production software to access BASE24 services from an external process.

The above graphics show on one side, the product capabilities (eg: AWS interaction) and also concrete ideas of potential projects that we had in mind to start integration of our core transitional BASE24 system with the LightWave products. At this point, the possibilities for integrations continued to arise and we continued to demonstrate the products’ abilities to integrate with services”?

In 2020, the implementation of two production solutions began:

1. Provide a NSP (Network Security Processor) CVC/CVV calculation service. This service was a re-tooling of a batch process converted into a Pathway server and as such, expose it via LightWave Server™.

It was managed in a short time by retooling a batch process to act as a Pathway server and as such, expose it as LightWave Serve™.

2. Start the BASE24 integration to allow any BASE24 module to be able to be served by REST services hosted on LightWave Server™.

In this last example, the key was the creation of a XPNET satellite process to serve as a bridge between BASE24 and the REST Web services all through the reuse of existing DDL structures.

Initially, the process was coded in a WAITED state, but in a second release, the NOWAITED state was added to improve performance without leaving aside/changing/affecting the simplicity of the solution.

These two experiences were very good and allowed us to increase our technical knowledge of the NuWave LightWave products. We continue to analyze the robustness of the LightWave products, along with their troubleshooting features. This is vital for any product operating in our production environment, given that it is required to have traceability of all the messages to use in the post-mortem analysis of incidents. The NuWave LightWave products provide a simple interface and tools to enable the traceability of services and exposure of REST services within HPE NonStop. Adding the XPNET audit traces provided excellent resources for the analysis of production incidents.

The use of both LightWave Server™ and LightWave Client™allowed us to improve our time to market on projects that required integration with external API services.

Around 2022, we will start to explore new features of the LightWave products, such as user measure counters to enable additional online metrics, such as usage monitoring and tracking. The feature FILE-BLOB allowed us to replace our existing data transfer mechanism, which uses FTP, to a new mechanism that uses REST Web services.

Advances were also made with the integration, upgrade, and technological updates of other systems to increase the efficiency and the number of interactions of business processes that were giving operational errors. In this next example, a feed is received from Red Link’s fraud system using REST, which is stored in an Enscribe database for further online control.

To date, we continue to explore and integrate new services with NonStop using LightWave Server™ and LightWave Client™, so we can modernize our core transaction processing, complementing its robustness and enabling new communications interfaces to BASE24 and the NonStop platform.

The use of NuWave’s LightWave solutions has allowed us to facilitate integrations, and we have a backlog of new POCs that are awaiting implementation.

The LightWave solutions will continue to be a large part of the Red Link infrastructure, and the products’ uses will continue to expand for many years to come. Going with NuWave for our REST infrastructure has proven to show value in every implementation and we look forward to a long-standing relationship with them.