Designing a Generic Payment Service

The growing importance of electronic commerce has resulted in the birth of a plethora of different and incompatible payment systems. For business application writers this implies the need to understand the details of different mechanisms, to adapt the code as soon as new payment schemes arrive and also to provide a way of finding a common mechanism for every transaction. In our work, we unify the different mechanisms in a common framework with APIs. Our framework provides services for transparent negotiation and selection of payments 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.