Designing a generic payment service

The growing importance of electronic commerce has resulted in the introduction of a variety of different and incompatible payment systems. For business application developers, this variety implies the need to understand the details of different systems, to adapt the code as soon as new payment systems are introduced, and also to provide a way of picking a suitable payment instrument for every transaction. In our work, we unify the different mechanisms in a common framework with application programming interfaces. Our framework provides services for transparent negotiation and selection of payment instruments as well. This allows applications to be developed independent of specific payment systems with the additional benefit of providing a central point of control for payment information and policies.