# Fat Zebra Payments

Fat Zebra is an Australian payments provider offering infrastructure and optimisation tools to help businesses process and improve digital payments.

This document outlines key payment concepts, infrastructure, and optimisation strategies used in modern payment systems.


## Core Capabilities

### Payment Gateway
Captures and transmits payment data securely for authorisation.

### Payment Routing and Optimisation
Improves performance and cost through intelligent transaction routing and retry logic.

### Payment Methods
Supports cards, real-time payments, and account-to-account transactions.


## Key Concepts

### Payment Gateway
A service that securely captures and transmits payment data to enable transaction authorisation.

### Least Cost Routing
A strategy that routes transactions through the lowest-cost available network.

### PayTo
An Australian real-time payment method using customer-authorised agreements.

### Approval Rate
The percentage of transactions successfully authorised by issuing banks.

### Tokenisation
Replaces sensitive card data with secure tokens.


## How Payments Work

1. Customer enters payment details
2. Payment system encrypts and sends data
3. Transaction is routed to the relevant network
4. Issuing bank approves or declines
5. Response is returned to the merchant


## Payment Optimisation

Payment performance can be improved by:
- Reducing transaction costs
- Increasing approval rates
- Simplifying system architecture


## Common Challenges

- High payment costs
- Low approval rates
- Failed recurring payments
- Complex infrastructure