The Concourse — Fees & Commissions product incorporates user-defined business rules that allow companies to have complete control over the assessment, allocation, and distribution of transaction-based fees, commissions, and rebates. Concourse — Fees & Commissions allows companies to do the following:

• Assess fees, commissions, and rebates based upon all transaction data elements
• Calculate fees from multiple transaction sources
• Configure fee types and rate schedules based on specific business rules
• Assess one or many fees per transaction
• Implement flat or tiered fee structures
• Audit external fees by calculating the expected fees for result comparison
• Input external fees via a user interface or an automated feed
• Initiate trial runs to evaluate the financial impact of alternative fee schemes
• Access fee transactions using the Transaction Repository Viewer
• Access financial position using the online Settlement Summary Viewer
• Review reports for all settled fees and fee audits

Below is a more extensive overview of the specific features and corresponding benefits of Concourse — Fees & Commissions.

The Concourse Expression Generator allows a company to easily configure user-defined business rules for its fee, commission, and rebate structures. This architecture eliminates the need for hard-coded fee or commission types and allows a company to define the types based on its specific business needs.

Concourse — Fees & Commissions can be configured to assess multiple fee, commission, and rebate types for a single transaction. Consequently, fee schemes can be highly granular and uniquely tailored to any customer.

Concourse — Fees & Commissions supports two types of assessment configurations: Flat and Tier. A flat fee assessment is based on a percentage calculation or a fixed calculation. The tiered fee capabilities provide companies with additional, flexible options for crafting customized fee plans to appeal to different customer groups. Concourse — Fees & Commissions provides the ability to configure the following types of tiering structures:

• Fill-a-Tier — Allows a company to define different per transaction processing rates for transactions based on individual customer volume in a billing period. For example, fill-a-tier assessments would allow a $.10 / transaction processing rate to be charged for the first ten thousand transactions in a given month, an $.08 / transaction processing rate for the next 20 thousand transactions, and $.05 / transaction rate for all additional transactions.



• Earn-a-Tier — Allows a company to retroactively change the per transaction processing rate for transactions that have occurred previously in a billing period if certain customer volume criteria are met. For example, earn-a-tier assessments would allow a $.10 / transaction processing rate to be charged for the first ten thousand transactions in a given month; however, if the total monthly transaction volume for a customer exceeded ten thousand transactions, then the total processing fee for all previous transactions would be adjusted to the tier achieved.

The Concourse Transaction Loader continuously retrieves transactions from the front-end authorization application. The Concourse Network Loaders also capture details from all external network partners. Fees can be assessed based on the transactional data received from these external sources, or if a fee is provided by the external source it can simply be passed through to minimize fee calculation differences. In addition, a user interface is provided for the manual entry of fees that are received in a non-electronic form, such as those found in reports or spreadsheets. A manual fee load process is available to allow fees and commissions generated by another system to be introduced to the Concourse — Fees & Commissions system for reporting and settlement. This allows all fees to be presented in a uniform manner and settled by the same process.

With Concourse — Fees & Commissions, companies are able to support current and future fee, commission, and rebate schemes in their production environment. The audit fee feature allows current production and future production fee, commission, and rebate schemes to exist concurrently and only allow the current production scheme to be submitted to settlement. Fee audits are included on system owner reports to allow companies to evaluate the outcome of different schemes.

In addition to allowing new fee, commission, and rebate schemes to be evaluated, the fee audit feature can be used to internally audit fees assessed by external networks. The system owner fee reports allow companies to identify any fee discrepancies without the need for lengthy manual comparisons.

Concourse — Fees & Commissions provides a number of facilities to help companies manage exceptions and corrections related to fees. Below is a summary of these facilities.

• Fee Evaluation Exceptions. Transactions that are not assessed a fee are automatically identified. On-screen evaluation traces simplify the identification of fee configuration errors. A trial-run option is also available to verify the accuracy of the modified/new fee configurations before a selected set of fee assessment exceptions is submitted for re-evaluation.



• Fee Corrections. This facility allows companies to correct the fee/calculation configuration and through the use of the trial run feature, determine if the new configuration properly corrects the fees. After the configuration has been determined to be correct, it can be used to correct previously generated fees. Fee Corrections allows existing fees to be changed/removed and/or new fees to be generated.



• Trial Runs & Automated Retry. Concourse — Fees & Commissions also provides trial run services that allow companies to validate that configuration changes actually resolve the processing exceptions being investigated. The trial run facility uses working configuration versions that allow changes to configuration and business rules to be verified without disruption of the production system. Following a successful trial run, a configuration version can be scheduled for production use and all or a selected set of exceptions can be submitted for re-processing.

Concourse — Fees & Commissions supports client, network, processor, and system owner reports for a specified business date. In addition, a company and its clients can view and download fee settlement reports through the Concourse Settlement Summary Viewer.