Concourse is a suite of software products that provide back office processing for payment transactions. These products are built upon a number of fundamentals that are present across the entire product suite. A summary of these fundamentals and the corresponding benefits are described below.

Concourse breaks the batch barrier because it uses a service-oriented, continuous processing model. Companies no longer have to wait for all data to be submitted to perform funds movement because Concourse has the ability to accept continuous electronic payment transaction feeds from a wide range of front-end authorization / switching applications and process the incoming information as it arrives. This philosophy of near real-time data loading allows the processing of transactional data to be spread across the day, ensuring that daily funds movement deadlines are easily achieved. This approach is common to all business services and processing within the Concourse system. As each transaction is committed to the repository, it is shared with other Concourse business services where service-unique processing and summarization occur. An example of this is the assignment of fees to each transaction as it arrives, the accrual of the fee revenues earned and owed throughout the day, and the ability to view the fee results as soon as the transaction has been committed to the repository.

Concourse provides immediate access to the transaction detail contained in the repository, but more importantly, this detail is consumed by each business service allowing business day summarization to occur. These summaries provide a view into the current business day position. Continuous processing of data loading all the way through summarization allows end-of-day processing to be completed throughout the business day, thereby increasing the ability to quickly deliver time sensitive data, such as ACH files and reports, to clients and partners.

Concourse is designed to easily adapt to the changing needs of an organization. For example, it runs on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Multiple database options are also available. In addition, browser-based user access to Concourse can be supported by almost any mainline web server product. Concourse’s open architecture design ensures it will continue to meet the needs of a company regardless of change or growth.

Concourse is designed to be front-end neutral. As a result, Concourse can interface with a wide range of front-end EFT authorization and switching applications, including BASE24™, CONNEX™, and Authentic™. Concourse can also support multiple front-end EFT authorization and switching applications simultaneously. As a result, Concourse offers companies optimum flexibility when there is a need to modify the front-end transaction processing environment.

Concourse is designed to accommodate the performance needs of high volume financial service providers that have to fulfill demanding service level agreements. Concourse is architected so additional payment transaction processing streams can be handled by replicated software units that process parallel workloads. In addition to replicating software to handle increasing workloads, Concourse allows multiple software units to share the processing load at a single logical point in a transaction stream. The net effect is that multiple units of parallel processing software can be brought to bear at a single processing point, further reducing the risk of processing bottlenecks. No matter how fast a company grows, Concourse can handle the load.

The Concourse Transaction Repository and Viewer are compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations, including PA-DSS. These services utilize a user-to-data relationship access method to provide another layer of information security. This additional layer ensures that system users can only access the information and services consistent with their configured roles. Methods employed by Concourse to secure and retrieve "data at rest" include the following:

• Encryption of cardholder data — the PAN, expiration date, and cardholder name are encrypted in the Concourse repository.
• Configurable PAN masks — unique masks may be applied to displayed data based on the card issuing business, user logon, attribute(s) of the transaction, and any combination of the three.
• Data access tagging — allows tags to be assigned to transaction activities as they are loaded into the repository, based on any transaction attribute (acquiring business, terminal ID, PAN prefix, etc.). These tags are assigned to users and control the transactions within the repository that they can access. This method of data access control allows unique business relationship roles to be defined and enforced when viewing transactional data within the repository.
• Auditing of access to unprotected cardholder data — an audit trail item is created whenever a user is granted access to masked and non-masked cardholder data.

Concourse can be easily tailored to reflect a company's special branding or corporate design standards. As a result, a company can present its own look and feel to internal users and external clients, thereby creating a distinct product presence.

The Concourse suite includes a number of modular business services. Each business service leverages the data in the shared Transaction Repository as well as using its own service-specific configuration data to perform its specific business functions. Each service is designed to operate independently of other services, but is capable of subscribing to another service to enhance its data. In addition, each service provides reporting and on-screen searching capabilities to allow access to the data within its repository. The Concourse product suite includes the following business services that are also referred to as products:

• Concourse — Core™
• Concourse — Extended Settlement™
• Concourse — Reconciliation™
• Concourse — Disputes™
• Concourse — Fees & Commissions™

Concourse's modular design allows companies to add appropriate business services as they are required. Furthermore, since all Concourse business services are designed to readily integrate with each other, additional services can be added without changing previously deployed services.