Among funds capture payments, Oracle Payments handles credit card, PINless debit card, purchase card, and EFT transactions. This section explains the process flow for a typical credit card transaction.
Traditional credit card transaction processing involves a third party payer, a first party payee, an issuing bank, an acquiring bank, a payment processor, and, optionally, a payment gateway.
A credit card transaction consists of two phases: authorization and settlement. A typical flow might occur as follows:
Authorization
The third party payer purchases goods or services and sends credit card information as part of an order or invoice to the first party payee.
The first party payee accepts the order and sends an authorization request to the payment processor through Oracle Payments and optionally a payment gateway.
The payment processor matches the information with a database maintained by the issuing bank to determine if the customer has enough available credit to cover the transaction. If so, then the payment processor reserves the funds and sends an authorization code back to Oracle Payments.
Settlement
The first party payee delivers goods to the customer and needs to settle the transaction, that is, capture the funds reserved in the authorization. Settlement may occur at the same time as authorization. Settling transactions includes batch administration.
The first party payee issues capture, void, return, credit, and settlement batch functions to the payment processor through Oracle Payments and optionally, the payment gateway.
The payment processor settles the payment with the issuing bank and causes the funds to transfer to the acquiring bank.
Sometimes credit card processing networks decline transactions with a referral message indicating that the merchant must call the cardholder's issuing bank to complete the transaction. The payment information in such cases is submitted over the phone. If the transaction is approved, the merchant is provided with an authorization code for the transaction. To facilitate follow-on transactions through Oracle Payments for this voice authorization (for example, capture or void), Oracle Payments provides voice authorization support for gateway-model and processor-model payment systems.