Ravi Kumar Vallemoni

Canonical Payment Data Models for Merchant Acquiring: Merchants, Terminals, Transactions, Fees, and Chargebacks

Abstract - This paper presents a canonical payment data model that unifies merchant master records, terminal lifecycle management, transactional events (authorization, presentment/clearing, settlement), fee and interchange rating, and end-to-end chargeback workflows for merchant acquirers. Its design follows event sourcing with conformed dimensions and effective-dated reference data using disciplined Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) patterns Type 0 to represent stable identities, Type 1 to represent clerical corrections, and Type 2 to represent historized and time-varying attributes to ensure that all acquirers and schemes maintain point-in-time truth and reconciliation breaks are eliminated. Specify core entities and relationships, give ERDs representing terminal state transitions, transaction hops and dispute episodes, and also contain sample mappings between legacy flat files and ISO 8583/ISO 20022 messages into a core and analytic star schema. Auth presentment settlement chargeback is linked to a lineage blueprint that supports deterministic surrogate keys and rule versioning, achieving every financial result, therefore, explainable and reproducible. Auditable pricing and retrospective re-rating the pricing are supported using effective-dated and interchange tables which have hierarchical applicability (region, scheme, product, MCC, channel, risk). Some of the areas of implementation guidance include a layered lakehouse/warehouse (bronze/silver/gold), streamline authorizations, micro-batch settlement alignment, tokenization with a PCI scope, and data quality contracts. The concepts of faster onboarding by standardized contracts and devices provisioning, improved data quality by conformance gates and SCD stewardship and significantly reduced exceptions by uniform lifecycle semantics and disciplined typology of dispute are measured.

Brief Profile - For nearly two decades, I have worked as an Enterprise Information Architect. My focus has been payment data systems and regulatory compliance infrastructure at some of the largest financial institutions in the country — Bank of America, Citibank, and Truist Bank. Bank of America has re-engaged me across three separate programs over nine years, and the TrADS/Erica® role came through a direct recommendation from two Senior Vice Presidents. The bank had concluded that no one internally was the right fit for what the program needed. The programs I have led carry real national significance. The ISO 20022 migration at Bank of America was tied directly to the Federal Reserve’s FedNow mandate — not a discretionary upgrade, but a federally driven modernization of how payments move across the country. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Resolution Planning architecture I built governs $1.9 trillion in deposits and has been reviewed by federal regulators across multiple examination cycles. Before that, I designed data pipelines for Bank of America’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) stress testing program and Basel III Expected Positive Exposure (EPE) trend analysis — both mandatory Federal Reserve capital adequacy frameworks requiring penny-exact, federally traceable data across the bank’s entire balance sheet. I also designed the data infrastructure that powers Erica®, Bank of America’s AI assistant that more than 35 million customers use daily. None of these programs had a blueprint when I started — I built each one from scratch, under active federal scrutiny.