Create a modern payments platform with Red Hat

The backbone of today’s digital economy is the payment platform technology that processes billions of transactions across the globe every year. However, for many organizations, this technology is showing its age. 

This critical technology has evolved from mainframes and on-premise infrastructure, to distributed systems and cloud environments. Now, growing competition is creating pressure to innovate while reducing operating risk and costs, straining even the most capable payment platforms.

Shifting payments to a platform approach based on cloud-native microservices can increase resilience, agility, efficiency, and scalability to help manage those pressures. But without the right technology to support this strategy, organizations may struggle to realize its full potential.

Red Hat provides a fit-for-purpose platform that supports cloud-native microservices at scale and helps to: 

• Reduce operating costs and mitigate risk through advanced cloud management and policy enforcement capabilities. 
• Improve developer productivity with tools and frameworks that reduce cognitive load and toil. 
• Optimize infrastructure use by reducing hardware utilization and allowing for automatic scaling.
• Increase flexibility, allowing organizations to choose when to rehost, refactor, or reimagine payment services.
• Decrease time to value of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) projects by bringing together data scientists, operations, and developers on a unified platform.

Growing payment volumes and competitive pressures on fees are pushing many organizations to look for ways to reduce operating costs without sacrificing the flexibility needed to adaptively change where infrastructure lives. 

Some organizations prefer to keep payments on premise in their own datacenters, while others have decided to use third-party infrastructure providers and move payments into cloud environments.

With Red Hat, you can choose the most economical venue for your payments platform, while maintaining the same experience and operational capabilities anywhere. Additionally, you can optimize resource consumption and infrastructure costs as volume increases, with a platform optimized for cloud environments that provides greater resource density and automatic scaling capabilities.

Red Hat has built, tested, and certified Linux® and Kubernetes technologies to meet the stringent performance and scalability requirements of the most demanding environments across the globe. As such, Red Hat is trusted to support the most critical services in the world, including many of the payments networks that our digital economy is built on. 

Building your payments platform on a foundation that has been tested by the largest real-time payments networks in the world—and backed by Red Hat’s award-winning support—means that you can rely on the levels of efficiency, performance, and focus on security needed to meet even the most difficult service level requirements. As the need for modern payment platforms to support real-time payments becomes more important, this foundation of Red Hat® solutions also helps to efficiently cope with payment volume volatility by automatically scaling as volumes rise and fall.

Red Hat delivers the reliability, scalability, and performance required for modern payment platforms with a foundation primarily built on:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
  As the world’s leading enterprise Linux distribution¹, Red Hat’s enterprise-hardened, open source operating system (OS) is certified on hundreds of clouds and with thousands of hardware and software vendors.
• Red Hat OpenShift® Kubernetes Engine 
  This entry-level edition provides commercial support, upgrades, and patches, as well as an extensive compatibility test matrix for increased reliability, performance, and focus on security.

Modern application delivery methods allow organizations to create applications with improved speed, enhanced focus on security, and decreased operational costs, but this requires technology that reduces cognitive load for those creating payment services. 

Red Hat provides a range of capabilities that reduce friction to help you develop new and enhanced payment services that set you apart from the competition, and bring them to market faster.

These features—which are designed to empower developers to spend more time on the things that matter and less time integrating and maintaining technology—include:

• Red Hat OpenShift 
  This unified application platform for building, modernizing, and scaling payment services offers a complete set of tools for bringing new features to market on your choice of infrastructure. 
• Red Hat Developer Hub 
  This developer portal promotes efficiency and collaboration by allowing platform engineering teams to offer software templates and prearchitected, supported approaches to increase productivity. 
• Red Hat Connectivity Link 
  This hybrid and multicloud application connectivity solution brings together application programming interface (API) management, application connectivity, and policy management capabilities to help optimize performance, strengthen focus on security, and increase stability. 
• Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces 
  Provide your team with self-service developer environments to increase developer productivity and optimize costs. 
• Red Hat Application Foundations 
  This unified suite of tools increases developer productivity by providing the API management, data streaming, enterprise integration, application security, migration, and framework capabilities needed for cloud-native applications. 
• Red Hat build of Quarkus 
  Support high-throughput and low-latency applications with this modern Java framework for microservices with rapid startup times and a low memory footprint. 
• Red Hat OpenShift Local 
  This localized deployment of Red Hat OpenShift is designed to run on a laptop or desktop to simplify setup and testing, and to emulate the cloud development environment locally, with all of the tools needed to develop cloud-native applications.

The next generation of AI technologies is opening up new efficiencies and creating value for payments. Whether it is supporting financial crime prevention through better detection of nefarious activities or improving payments reconciliation, AI is becoming increasingly important in the era of real-time payments. 

However, for many organizations, the lead time for training, tuning, and integrating AI models is an obstacle. Red Hat helps overcome these challenges by bringing delivery teams together, including data scientists and developers, as well as operations and information security teams, to collaborate in a single destination that helps reduce time to value of AI initiatives.

This is made possible with Red Hat OpenShift AI—a set of flexible, scalable AI and ML tools that allows enterprises to create and deliver AI-driven services at scale in any cloud environment, and offers a unified approach to streamline delivery and reduce hand-off between groups to achieve sustainable value creation with AI and ML.

Many organizations have created a diverse set of systems to support the payment services they offer internally and to their customers, which can create problematic levels of cost and complexity as the technology estate grows. 

That complexity often leads to a lack of consistency that makes it difficult to scale operations in a commercially competitive manner, while the increasing operational costs can often divert financial resources away from the vital mission of delivering the types of payment products and services that are needed to remain competitive in the market.

With Red Hat, you can build a modern platform that provides consistency across different payment channels, routes, methods, and types to help manage operational scale, increase efficiency, and mitigate potential risks. 

Choosing Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus provides you with additional integrated security and management capabilities to help reduce operating costs, mitigate risk, and gain cloud scale. This includes out-of-the-box security policies and self-healing capabilities, and a consistent view of your payments operating environment, to help you meet your service level objectives and quickly identify failures.

Red Hat works with a range of payment vendors that provide everything from universal payment support to traditional domestic and cross-border payment capabilities, to offer preintegrated payment capabilities and flexible deployment and consumption models.

 With access to our extensive partner ecosystem and the larger open source community surrounding it, you can reduce the cost of integration and maximize the choices available to you. This level of flexibility allows you to buy only what you need, when you need it, and tailor it to your requirements where appropriate.

Additionally, with a Red Hat technology foundation, you can streamline updates to different parts of your payments platform without needing to upgrade the entire platform, which minimizes unnecessary disruptions to service delivery.

Red Hat’s suite of professional support services has helped organizations of all sizes across the globe hone their skills so that they can maximize the value of their technology investments. 

By sharing knowledge and working together to build a strategy, Red Hat’s approach to technology adoption can help you reduce costs and boost productivity gains. 

Unlock maximum value for your technology investments with:

• Red Hat Consulting 
  From idea to execution and beyond, our product experts help you streamline development, build agility, and maximize the value of your technology investment. Examples of consulting outcomes include constructing an integrated roadmap to streamline processes and enhance collaboration, or a cloud strategy to help your organization evolve at its own pace. 
• Red Hat Training and Certification 
  Assess your teams’ skills and access expert-created courses that equip your team with the knowledge and expertise needed to successfully use Red Hat technologies. This includes role-based courses and hands-on exams to develop and validate real-world skills.

With Red Hat’s technology platform, training, and support services as your foundation, you can create a modern payments platform that reduces operational cost and complexity, accelerates time to market, and simplifies how you build, deploy, manage, and enhance the security of modern payment services in the cloud. 

Learn more about how Red Hat is supporting the payments industry by helping organizations achieve the full benefits of payment platforms in cloud environments.