iDEAL Notification System has been defined as a central website to be used by Operational Officers at iDEAL participating banks for stating unavailability of the iDEAL product, based on which the website will inform registered banks, merchants and Payment Service Providers.

The iDEAL protocol is based on a four corner model. This network or distributed model requires a working co-operation among four parties to be able to successfully accomplish iDEAL transactions.

The parties actively participating in each iDEAL transaction are: Consumer, Merchant, Issuer, Acquirer.

 Each transaction is initiated by the consumer at the merchant's website, through the acquiring bank the transaction request is received by the issuing bank. In message exchange the merchant, acquirer and issuer form a chain, depending on each party's availability during message exchange. The iDEAL Document Suite defines performance requirements for each message exchange, if parties do not react within these timeouts the transaction fails. These parties are considered unavailable.

This unavailability can be caused by maintenance on the acquiring or issuing platform or on back-office applications (e.g. fiat) which are needed during the real-time part of the iDEAL transaction (excluded here are systems used for performing the credit transfer, since settlement is not handled real-time). Unavailability can also be caused by situations which are not known upfront, e.g. crashing applications, overloading or full disks. Unplanned unavailability is troublesome for merchants and consumers, since proper message exchange and communication is difficult to realise.

For both types of unavailability a central platform is envisioned which is able to collect unavailability information from issuing and acquiring banks and automatically generate and send notifications to registered banks and merchants to inform these parties of current and future unavailability.

We are currently providing ongoing support for this product: addressing support requests (questions, help in application use, bugs and changes), as well as periodical maintenance activities (installing certificates, installing updates, monitoring services, hosting machine maintenance, documentation update).