MediatR

Inspiration

The high number of fraudulent transactions taking place everyday makes it difficult for the consumers and merchants to build trust in each other and the lack of secure payment validation techniques provided us with an opportunity to work on this project.

What it does

By collaborating with Vantiv's payment processing services, we try to provide an efficient validation of the transactions taking place between consumers and merchants. The technology we developed is based on the real-time location of the consumer who is making the payment and the location where the transaction takes place. It is most often the case where the transactions get blocked when you're travelling as your location changes. We try to eliminate the hassle of calling the bank and verifying yourself to get the credit card unblocked. Thus, MediatR acts as mediator and validates the location of transaction by comparing it with the consumer's mobile location.

How we built it

We wanted to make the easiest user experience and decided to build an android application using the android SDK. We also worked on Vantiv API to process the payments and add the location attribute to it. Thus, most of our work was based in Java, Javascript, firebase and JSON objects. The architecture it follows is:

Consumer ---> Merchant ---> Vantiv ---> Issuing Bank
| |--------- MediatR -------------- |

Challenges we ran into

The biggest problem we faced was coming up with an implementation of the architecture that solves problems efficiently. We did not want to reduce the authentication time and wanted to make sure of the convenience of the clients. This is decreases the customer service time of banks as MediatR solves the problem of location differences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with a working prototype is one thing we're really proud of. With almost zero android experience and initiation of such an idea within the group made it more interesting and encouraged us to complete the project.

What we learned

We got to know about the Payment Processing architecture which is considered as one of the most challenging ones to understand and implement. By working on the this application and making the use of Vantiv API, we got our hands of some pretty interesting concepts and tools that we had not used before.

What's next for MediatR

Taking it to a larger scale as this is one such idea that does not exist in the current marketplace and could be taken to a bigger level. We would like to integrate our technology in the payment processing platform.