Merchants remain angry over Protx outage
Root cause analysis
Posted in Software & Security, 8th August 2007 09:00 GMT
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Merchants tried to shield their customers from the effect of problems with the transaction processing system. Several reported sending stock out without taking payment, in the hope and expectation that payments would go through successfully later.
Protx said merchants who experienced system problems beyond Wednesday afternoon had only themselves to blame for not applying changes it had informed them about over the last six months. "As a result these merchants may have been unable to process domestic Maestro transactions and/or transactions through the Protx virtual terminal."
Protx users who've contacted us with problems involving lack of customer testing facilities and sliding timescales at Protx in the run up to last week's outage, as well as its aftermath, reacted angrily to this criticism. Paul, a contractor, told us: "How dare they risk my business and then claim that the issues I am now experiencing are my fault? Why was this done at 6am on a weekday - why not 3am on a Sunday morning as most normal financial institutions would have done?"
"We implemented changes as we were told. We also got an exemption from Streamline for the Maestro 3D requirement. The system was certainly defunct well after 2:30pm," Gareth told us.
Jumping the gun on 3D Secure
The upgrade would have been simpler if Protx had not made the leap to 3D Secure. Merchants were getting conflicting advice from Protx and their banks on when this system needed to be rolled out. The experiences of Reg reader Gary seem typical in this respect. "Barclay Merchant Services said it's not due to be implemented until July 2008 which is why they hadn't felt the need to inform us. Perhaps ProtX are jumping the gun a bit on this, possibly even being good guys when others are less prepared. Anyway, the whole situation is a shambles," he told us.
Protx chief exec Michael Alculumbre acknowledged that differing messages from it and banks on the issue caused confusion.
"I am embarrassed by the different and sometimes conflicting advice that many of you will have received from your acquiring bank and from Protx regarding 3D Secure registration and separate merchant accounts for MOTO and e-commerce transactions. I also realise that this must have been extremely frustrating and I would again apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused you," he writes.
"My staff did their utmost to ensure that Protx met bank requirements but we found this to be a significant challenge in trying to legislate and manage the banks' changing requirements where one rule would be applied for one merchant and another rule would be applied for a different merchant." ®
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