Product focus: How Form3’s Metrics service opens up granular insights into payment traffic and gateway performance

To ensure our clients have complete confidence and visibility across the managed services that Form3 offers – and to ensure compliance from a governance and regulatory perspective – the Form3 Metrics service is crucial. It allows customers to have full visibility into performance and details of the payments which Form3 are processing on their behalf. Effectively, it means customers can observe their usage of the Form3 platform and gain insights into their payment traffic and gateway performance, in close to real time. 

To break that down, Form3’s fully managed service consists of four intrinsically linked layers that incorporate Payment Gateway Services; the Core Account-to-Account Payments Platform and suite of APIs; Payment & Financial Crime Orchestration; and Data & Analytics Services.

The Data & Analytics layer contains data services that provide insights into the Gateway, Platform and Orchestration layers. Form3's Metrics service is an extension of the Data & Analytics layer, monitoring multiple process flows within the Platform and Gateway layers.

The output of this Metrics service is available via API for a client to collect and digest into their own internal systems to enable effective operational support and monitoring. This means they don’t need to rely on our regular reports to know what’s going on with their payment flows – they can keep an eye on everything themselves. 

One of the chief benefits of the Metrics service is that it opens up the ‘black box' for Form3 clients. With fully managed account-to-account (A2A) payment and gateway services, many banks don’t get full visibility on payment flows that Form3 handles for them. But those that do utilise the Metrics service can see inside the black box and observe Form3's processing engine, then get details and aggregated views on processing time, volumes, and values. 

Beyond this increased visibility and transparency, customers can get right into the granular details. The Metrics service allows them to drill down into processing times of the various legs of the journey, utilise available attributes like scheme status code and payment priority groups (PPGs) to filter or get aggregated views of volumes and values, stand-in queues, subscriptions, and so on.

For instance, if a payment from a sending bank cannot be validated or processed by Form3, meaning it can't reach the receiving bank, this results in an incident that needs to be reported to regulators. End users expect to be able to make and receive payments on a 24/7/365 basis, so spotting problems as they happen is key.

Our customers have the ability to fetch their metrics by using Prometheus-native queries and integrate the solution with their own existing Enterprise Service Bridge and dashboard functionality (e.g. Grafana) to visualise available metrics and create fully customised views, aligned to roles as required.

This means they can assess the impact of the outage or technology failure, instigate their own mitigation plans, and communicate effectively with their customers in the event of an incident. Ultimately, managing these incidents effectively will prevent end user dissatisfaction, a key consideration for banks that want to prevent customer churn. In this sense, having access to the Metrics service is a competitive advantage.

It’s this access to the very customers’ data that Form3 processes internally that makes Metrics unique. Usually, third-party providers only provide dashboard displays of their products to clients. We’re opening up our black box to show exactly what’s going on inside – we haven’t converted it into a static dashboard, but give clients a full view of our world, so they can see the same metrics that we use for internal monitoring, incident management and measuring gateway and platform performance.  

Metrics can also play a vital role in driving efficiencies and lowering operating costs. For example, when customers are in a maintenance window, without Metrics they would have to rely on us to provide support and details to check that everything was working when they bring their service back online.

Form3 clients should consider investing in adding the Metrics service to their package for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can cut down the amount of time and resource they put into contacting Form3 for updates on payment processing, incidents, maintenance and migrations, as they can have all of this data at their fingertips instead.

The advanced operational monitoring capabilities of Metrics really come into their own where incident management is concerned. In a world where seamless service delivery is something that end users expect, and outages can have severe reputational and financial consequences, all businesses must ensure that they have robust processes in place to detect, respond, and communicate effectively during incidents.