The multiple systems monitoring tools will allow the company to monitor the ‘health’ of various payment streams through graphical displays that translate complex technical details into a real-time picture of Visa’s global payment infrastructure.

The tools, called Visa Service Views, were developed over a 24-month period and unveiled at META Group’s annual conference, named Metamorphosis, in San Francisco on March 1. They allow Visa to track every transaction running through VisaNet, the world’s largest payments processing network.

Annually, Visa’s global payment system handles more than 40 billion transactions, and processes payments in excess of $1.7 trillion. Some 21,000 financial institutions and more than 20 million merchant locations are connected to VisaNet worldwide, and rely on Visa’s payment systems to conduct commerce in 136 countries.

The new monitoring tools display data in a myriad of formats, from red-yellow-green ‘traffic’ indicators, to color graphs, to ‘tickers’ crawling across the bottom of a desktop computer or PDA screen. Because the data is being monitored in real time, it allows real-time alerts about any problems or bottlenecks in the payment network, allowing traffic to be routed around the trouble spots quickly with minimal impact on operations.

This is like putting a simple-to-read, simple-to-interpret dashboard on the most powerful and reliable payments processing network on the world, said Ben Rewis, vice president at Inovant, Visa’s IT organization. By tailoring this information to the needs of our Member financial institutions, we not only deliver reporting they really care about, we also improve the reliability and flexibility of VisaNet.

Over the next year, Visa will be extending some of these services directly to its member financial institutions, as well as large merchants and others with a direct connection into VisaNet. This will allow members to obtain real-time reporting that matches up with the metrics they choose to gauge their business, and measure how their products are performing in the marketplace.