dc.description.abstract | In East Africa and Africa in general, we have several innovations in the payments processing
sector that are each aimed at solving a critical business function. Currently, we have payment
systems such as mobile payment systems from Telco providers, instant remittance systems, card
based payment systems from banks, Electronic Funds Transfer systems and Real Time Gross
Settlement systems. Each type of payment systems has its own standards and protocols for
integration to client facing applications. Mobile payment systems use telecommunication
protocols such as: GSM, SMPP, CDMA, GPRS, and microwave. Card based systems use
protocols meant for secure card payments such as: magnetic strip cards and smart/chip cards.
Electronic Funds Transfer use interchange specification formats that are based on ISO 8583
standards. To tackle the issue of incompatibilities among the above diverse protocols, this paper
explores an agent-based model for coordination and its impact in unifying payments from
various industries. In this paper, an agent-based model for coordination is designed and an
illustration on how to use open source tools such as: jPOS, Java and XML to implement such
models. | en |