ePayment pilot project in Brandenburg

Client

The German State of Brandenburg/People’s University of Brandenburg (VHS Brandenburg an der Havel) Brief
Development of plug-ins for connecting VHS Brandenburg to the Brandenburg State’s payment platform

The challenge

In recent years the Federal Government and several states (Northrhine-Westfalia, Saxony, Brandenburg) have developed a multi-client enabled payment platform which is to be expanded for eGovernment purposes with ePayment functions. This will enable citizens in future not only to request services over the internet but to pay for them too. It greatly simplifies the handing of charges, and enables money to be saved on the administration. Also the processing large numbers of transactions through a single platform enables the negotiation of more advantageous tariffs with payment service providers.

The pilot project in Brandenburg involved the university, VHS Brandenburg a. d. H., which wanted to equip its existing web shop with a payment function. It wanted to be able to take payment for course books online. This required an automatic connection (an interface between the payments platform and the “Informa” checkout system belonging to the City of Brandenburg.

Solution

The payments platform has a plug-in system which can be set up to meet the various requirements of check-out systems. This system is, as it were, the payment platform’s “connection block”. DResearch built a “plug” (in fact a plug-in) to link the payment platform and the checkout systems. This meant determining the formats which enabled the required data exchange.

DResearch will now not need to develop any more plug-ins for other checkout systems from scratch because all the commonalities were combined in a single future-proof standard plug-in which in future can be easily and cheaply adapted for other checkout systems. That saves money and time for any other German states and local authorities who in future also want to use the payment platform.