when I first started reading, I thought it would be insane if those thousands of transactions per second were web services transactions, because those would be some pretty fat message stacks and I wouldn't even want to imagine the infrastructure required to keep them going at that pace.
in any case, the dispute-resolution scenario seems very conducive to a web services approach. and it made me think of the WS standards in a different perspective - outsourcing. essentially, Visa, member banks, and everyone else that uses the various WS standards is outsourcing the development of their internet-capable communication infrastructure.
I thought of it this way...
without WS standards, if Visa were to accomplish the same thing, they would need to spend time and money developing a method by which all of their member banks could communicate, via the internet, to their backend system for the dispute-resolution process. however, with WS standards, they can settle on the publicly-available HTTP, SOAP, REST, FTP, etc standards.
the article did not go so far as to say whether or not they were using things like BPEL4WS to model/manage the business processes involved in the entire procedure of dispute-resolution, but if they do, then that is yet another methodoly/platform that they did not have to develop in-house.
obviously, for those companies that pay to help develop these standards, it's not entirely free. however, it does help the standards-developers stay focused on their standards, rather than having to worry about this or that implementation of the standard.
that is all for now, though I'm still reading a few more articles, so another post may yet happen.</div>
