DESIGNING A GENERIC PAYMENT SERVICE

The growing importance of electronic commerce has resulted in the intr oduction of a variety of different and incompatible payment systems. F or business application developers, this variety implies the need to u nderstand the details of different systems, to adapt the code as soon as new payment systems are introduced, and also to provide a way of pi cking a suitable payment instrument for every transaction. In our work , we unify the different mechanisms in a common framework with applica tion programming interfaces. Our framework provides services for trans parent negotiation and selection of payment instruments as well. This allows applications to be developed independent of specific payment sy stems with the additional benefit of providing a central point of cont rol for payment information and policies.