Administration Guide for Oracle Billing Insight > Payment Transactions >

About Credit Card Payment Transactions

The user interface to the Payment module can offer a variety of credit card payment options. Some of those options require you to configure fields in Payment Settings for a credit card payment gateway. Oracle Billing Insight supports credit reversals.

Credit card processing usually occurs in the following order:

1. A user enters a credit card number and other card-related information.
2. The card information is sent to the card-issuing bank for authorization. Authorization only guarantees that the money is available at the time of authorization.
3. The merchant issues a settlement request to the issuing bank so that the money can be transferred. The merchant usually does this request after fulfillment, or sending out ordered goods. For bill payments, the biller does not send out ordered goods, so authorization and synchronization are combined into one operation so that a credit card payment is settled at the same time it is authorized.

Because credit card processing is in real-time and not batch-based, the life cycle for credit cards is not as complex as check processing.

Figure 3 shows the entities involved in a credit card payment transaction.

Figure 3. Credit Card Payment Transactions