4 Key Digital Functionalities

Key Digital Functionalities describe the core (required) functions that this Building Block must be able to perform.

The Payment Building Block will handle payments processing and orchestration, including verification of user information, confirmation of payee details, verification of destination account for the beneficiary, fee calculation, and handling of automated bulk transactions.

The Building Block will enable government programs to channel payments through a shared payments infrastructure to accounts at multiple providers, allowing citizens to choose their preferred Financial Services Provider and switch providers if their circumstances change or they discover a better service.

4.1 Payment Orchestration

Payments orchestration provides for end-to-end workflow across different sub-subsystems, enables asynchronous processing, and covers different payment types, use cases, account systems, and channels.

4.2 Voucher Management

The Payment Building Block will provide a voucher management system which is responsible for provisioning, storage, issuance, activation, redemption, validation, suspension, unsuspension, purging, and reporting on vouchers.

4.3 Account Lookup Services (Account Mapper)

The account lookup directory service identifies the Financial Service Providers (FSP) where the merchant/agent/payee’s account is located.

The account lookup directory service or mapper simplifies payment routing and is an important component to avoid storing the payment information of the user in the social registry system and preserve the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive information pertaining to the beneficiary.

4.4 Payment Request Initiation

The Payment Building Block must allow systems to initiate a payment request. This request could come from two sources: external or internal. An external source could be another GovStack Building Block (e.g. the Registration Building Block or Social Benefits Registry Building Block or Payroll).

4.5 Payment Gateway

The Payments Building Block should provide a payment gateway which allows different (digital) Financial Service Providers (FSPs) to interoperate.

4.6 Payment Portal

The Payments Building Block should provide a Payment Portal which allows users to manage thje full lifecycle of sending and receiving payments

4.7 Event Management

The Payment Building block must support different events related to triggering specific actions on payment outcomes such as issuing receipts upon successful payment, automating payments in case of bulk transactions, passing information to other Building Blocks as necessary, and handling exceptional cases for instance user/system errors amongst others.

4.8 Reconciliation

The Payments Building block must implement functionality that provides both internal and external reconciliation services.

4.9 Batch Processing

The Payments Building Block should provide batch processing services

4.10 Scheduling Services

The Payments Building Block should provide scheduling services to perform tasks on a regular or repeated basis

4.11 Event Logging

Each component of the Payments Building Block should be capable of producing both application and transaction logs. This is important to ensure that the system can be adequately monitored and troubleshooting can be performed efficiently and effectively.

4.12 Audit Logging

Audit trails are required to provide assurance of the integrity of the requests received and actions taken on these requests. An audit trail is a chronological record of system activities that is sufficient to enable the reconstruction and examination of the sequence of environments and activities surrounding or leading to an operation, procedure, or event in a transaction from inception to final results. The audit trail shall comply with the following requirements:

4.13 Reporting Services

The Building Block should provide reporting services, which may consist of dashboards or analytics reports. These reports should be configurable based on user needs.

4.14 Security layer

The Payments Building Block must provide a security layer which protects the system at the transport and application levels. It provides the necessary APIs for encrypting the data in transit and when stored as well as the digital signatures used for API authentication.

4.15 Bulk payment service

The Payments Building Block must provide bulk payment services. This bulk payment service is invoked in the case of G2P bulk disbursement.