CSC White Paper Highlights CAMS II Card & Merchant System Benchmarks on Scalability and Performance

In-House Cards Processing: An Emerging Trend

Across the world, major issuers and acquirers are moving their card processing operations in-house in an effort to drive down costs while exercising greater control over customer relationships. Related to this trend, scalability and performance have become critical criteria as high-volume issuers and acquirers evaluate the out-of-the-box cards-management software applications offered by leading technology vendors.

Consolidation within the global cards industry means that major players can now achieve economies of scale with in-house processing, which makes cards processing outsourcing less compelling. In fact, eight of the ten largest U.S. card issuers already insource all or most functions such as credit card application processing and issuing, transaction authorization, fraud detection and statement production. The cards market is quickly approaching a watershed event: Soon the majority of U.S. card accounts will be processed on in-house systems.

CSC Benchmarks CAMS II for Scalability and Performance

CSC recently completed benchmark testing of its CAMS II™ Card & Merchant System software for in-house cards processing. The testing proved that in-house cards processing with CAMS II is a highly efficient, scalable and cost-effective alternative for market-leading issuers and acquirers. The results clearly demonstrate that CAMS II can process more than 100 million active card accounts without sacrificing speed and performance. As a point of reference, according to the Nilson Report’s 2003 rankings of largest bank credit card issuers, no U.S. card issuer yet had more than 50 million active card accounts.

Because CSC targets its solutions to high-volume banks, issuers and acquirers, scalability and performance are competitive differentiators for CAMS II. And as the new trend for in-house cards processing continues to evolve, scalability and performance will become more important than ever before.

Executing the Benchmark with IBM’s Services

CSC contracted with IBM's Performance Management Testing & Scalability Services to complete a benchmark of the CAMS II issuer system that would provide confidence in the ability of CAMS II to support large card portfolios. CSC and IBM executed this benchmark to:

• Demonstrate the performance and scalability of the online and batch components of CAMS II
• Determine how CAMS II performs under extremely large workloads including transaction volumes associated with 50 million and 100 million active cardholder accounts
• Validate the extent to which the base CAMS II application is scalable and identify potential scalability bottlenecks
• Define baseline product metrics to evaluate future customization impacts
• Project hardware configurations in support of targeted workloads.

CSC’s five-month effort to benchmark the scalability and performance of CAMS II was conducted at IBM’s Benchmarking Center in Gaithersburg, Md. The project simulated a diverse portfolio of 100 million active card accounts. CSC’s professional business consultants spent three months developing the underlying test profiles and data based on real-world card activity. The test was executed using more than 51 million online and batch transactions.

Conclusion

From the results of this benchmark, combined with IBM’s professional opinion and CSC’s industry experience in large system design and delivery, CSC reaffirms that the CAMS II issuer system can both perform and scale to meet the business needs of the largest card issuers worldwide. The successful completion of this CAMS II benchmark also clearly documents the level of system resources that are required to meet the performance requirements and service level objectives for the various account levels and configurations tested.

With CAMS II, issuers, acquirers and processors can globally manage all customer card products on a single platform without sacrificing performance. “Oftentimes, large card volumes are processed on multiple systems,” commented George Guzman, senior consultant for CSC’s card solutions. “Just think of the value that one centralized platform can offer for processing your business, such as cost efficiencies, improved data mining and a broader picture of the customer.”

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