Futurex Crypto Chat with Transactility and jPOS: Payment Trends, Innovations, Java “Aha” Moment

Adam Cason, vice president, global and strategic alliances, Futurex, chats with Alejandro Revilla, jPOS project founder

Adam: Tell us about jPOS and Transactility’s role with this open-source software.

Alejandro: jPOS is an open-source, Java-based software that enables messaging and communication between payment entities in order to process electronic financial transactions in ISO-8583 format. It is completely scalable, with multiple thousands of transactions-per-second (TPS) solutions deployed in the market. jPOS has seen widespread adoption — well over 100,000 downloads in use in more than 110 countries — and, today, touches roughly 80% of all electronic transactions globally.

Transactility is the sole provider of commercial licensing for jPOS, allowing enterprises that don’t wish to publish any changes to the original jPOS source code (as required by the open-source license) to keep their solutions private. Transactility also provides development, implementation, support, and consulting services for jPOS, jCARD (an enterprise card management system based on jPOS), and jPTS (a dynamic transaction switch based on jPOS). Together, these products integrate seamlessly between legacy and emerging financial technology solutions.

Adam: What are some interesting jPOS applications that you’ve seen lately?

Alejandro: Recently, we completed an implementation project with ARCA, a payment company based in Nigeria. We implemented a jPTS and jCARD combined solution to deliver industry-leading flexibility and capacity. ARCA’s platform harnesses jPOS at its core to facilitate instant payments and full integration of entities within the payments ecosystem through open banking. What’s really exciting about this use case is the potential impact. ARCA is truly leading the industry in payments/banking innovation in not only Nigeria, which is a rapidly growing economy and global player, but throughout Africa and Europe. Its management and technical lead are fully aligned with us on how good technology should work and how open-source software can be leveraged to create outstanding performance and flexibility.

Adam: How are payments solutions innovating?

Alejandro: If we look at the current fintech industry, specifically within payments, there’s such a wide diversity of innovative platforms and technologies gaining traction. Digging deeper, these innovations are really driven by a few primary consumer demands: increased security, reduced cost of transactions, and increased flexibility — all while occurring seamlessly behind the scenes and integrated with commonly used interfaces. Payment solutions are constantly evolving along these priorities, working to deliver one, a combination of, or all of those demands more readily to consumers. Incumbent legacy solutions, although widespread, are continuously forced to innovate and adjust their business models to compete with emerging disruptors in the industry and remain relevant.

Adam: What global payment trends are you seeing?

Alejandro: One of the biggest trends we’re seeing is maximum integration across platforms and external solutions. It goes back to the flexibility demands of consumers. In order to be flexible, and provide the most options to consumers, payment processors need to effectively integrate with other solutions, channels, and capabilities. Vendors and payment processors need to be able to accept credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, split payments, etc. in order to fit the needs of consumers. To do this, technologies must integrate and be accessible across platforms.

That’s one advantage that we have seen with jPOS — it levels the playing field. jPOS is the underlying base that allows diverse and innovative solutions to communicate and integrate with the payments ecosystem. It’s also why we see such value in open-source software; to truly enable integration with new and disruptive players.

Adam: When was your first Java “aha” moment?

Alejandro: My first “aha” moment with Java was when I first started working with it in the mid 1990s. Prior to that time, I was used to working with C language and, later, C++. These languages provided very low-level memory access. Thus, developers had to pay constant attention to preventing segmentation violations/faults while coding. Then, during my first encounter with the Java Platform, I quickly realized how much simpler it was to manage memory segmentation.

Having come from C and C++ languages, it was a great moment — I said to myself “this thing just works!” Similarly, I was working on point-of-sale (POS) development in C and wanted to come up with a PC-based version. Doing graphics in MS-DOS wasn’t straightforward, so when I came across JavaPC, a MS-DOS-based Java Runtime Environment (JRE) providing decent abstract Windows toolkit (AWT) implementation, it was a gamechanger. Ultimately, it gave birth to our name, Java-based POS.