Axis – the foundation of Elavon payments
The strongest buildings rely on solid foundations. Axis is ours and, like all good foundations, it does its job without most people knowing about it.
“Being able to take it for granted is a testament to its success,” says Tom O’Shea, Vice President of Transaction Systems at Elavon Europe.
“It’s secure, scalable and runs at lightning speed – it’s the unseen backbone for all authorisation processing in Elavon.”
Axis is pivotal to transaction processing at Elavon and has recently secured a number of industry accolades from The Strawhecker Group (TSG), the largest analytics and consulting firm focused on the payments acceptance industry.
Using the firm’s Gateway Enterprise Metrics (GEM) platform, which monitors gateway performance on a 24x7x365 basis for over twenty of the world’s leading gateways and switches, in 2020 Axis ranked first for Gateway Availability** and for the highest Transaction Success Rate*.
“When you build anything, you want to build it once and build it right”, says Kelly Price, Senior Technical Communications Consultant at Elavon Europe.
“Axis is the epitome of that goal, and yet we’re constantly improving it to make it ever more adaptable to our customer needs and industry standards.”
Reliable and trusted
Simply put, Axis is known as a switch which handles card authorisation requests and routes those requests to Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express or JCB for approval by the card issuer. It then waits for a response and sends that back to the customer.
Remarkably, it takes far longer to explain than it takes to happen in real life – the process you’ve just read takes between 10-20 milliseconds for Axis to complete, coupled with an additional 500 milliseconds for a card issuer response.
Axis is developed exclusively by Elavon to power our continued success and that of our European customers and partners.
The advantage of Axis
Confidence – We strive to ensure your payments service won’t be interrupted so you can provide a smooth customer experience:
- Axis is extremely reliable and processes more than 3 billion European transactions every year.
- With end-to-end encryption and tokenisation, customer’s payment data never touches your servers or devices.
- Our system is battle-tested every day to eliminate potential vulnerabilities.
- Vital servers processing transactions are split across different sites in different countries for added protection.
- None of our servers run close to capacity to allow for a seamless switch of traffic during maintenance without impacting our customers.
Efficiency – in time, effort and costs:
- Axis already operates across 36 European territories which simplifies the business model for you. So if you’re acquiring with Elavon, you only need one contract to meet your needs in all those territories.
- No matter what currency or market you’re operating in you can manage it all in one place with our comprehensive single-view reporting platform. Elavon Connect gives you a clear line of sight on all your transactions – so trends can be identified and payment processes can be constantly improved.
Made for you – Axis can be customised to meet your needs:
- We work directly with multiple networks and partners on your behalf so you can by working with us you get the best of everyone’s offerings in one process.
- Axis is already integrated with all major gateways, tills, card machines and payment service providers (PSPs) across Europe.
With Axis you can act locally using a global standard whether you’re operating a market stall or across international markets.
Axis is our hidden advantage which means working with Elavon Europe gives you that advantage.
Sources
*TSG/GEM Semi-Annual report 2020/H2
**TSG/GEM Semi-Annual report 2020/H1