Payments and cards switch
The movement of money in real time, and the fee events attached to each movement.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Authorisations, clearings, settlements, interchange, chargebacks and the merchant or cardholder context around them.
Authorisation, Clearing record, Settlement file, Interchange fee, Chargeback, Merchant, Terminal
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Streaming for authorisations, file-based for clearing and settlement. Volume is very high and the retention of raw messages is usually short.
An authorisation and its clearing are matched on a retrieval reference number that is not always unique or present, which is why matched rates are never one hundred per cent.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Authorisation is not settlement
Amounts differ, some authorisations never clear, and reversals are common. Revenue built on authorisations overstates.
Scheme fee complexity
Interchange depends on card type, channel, region and merchant category. Modelling it approximately produces a margin that is confidently wrong.
Chargebacks arrive much later
Disputes land months after the transaction, so early profitability views on merchant portfolios are provisional.
Very short raw retention
If aggregation happens before capture, the analysis you want next year is simply not available.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| Core banking | transaction behaviour behind an account balance |
| CRM | merchant or cardholder relationship and its true profitability |
| Fraud and risk | patterns across accounts and merchants, which need both sides |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
What is the most valuable analysis on payments data?
Merchant or portfolio profitability after interchange, scheme fees and chargebacks. Each component exists in a different file, which is exactly why it is rarely produced.
How much raw payment data should be kept?
Enough to re-derive the aggregate. Once the raw messages are gone, every future question is limited to the shape of the aggregate someone chose in advance.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.