The solution will build on the strength of ACI’s money transfer system to help banks meet near-term requirements for SEPA compliance while offering a longer term solution to support the convergence of high- and low-value payments using a service-oriented architecture. The first release of this solution will be available by the end of 2008, said ACI Worldwide.
As part of a strategic alliance forged by the companies in 2007, IBM will provide ACI with technical staff and laboratory support for benchmarking and performance tuning its payments software. The companies will focus a worldwide team of sales and technical specialists dedicating to selling ACI solutions on System z and helping clients simplify migrations from legacy systems.
The company claims that the new MTS-eps will provide a consolidated solution capable of processing both low- and high-value payments in a single system. The first stage increases the functionality of the existing SEPA solution by incorporating the IBM payments framework on IBM System p. Subsequent stages, available on both System z and System p, will incorporate functionality for middle office processing, bulk (ACH) processing and settlement, and the RTGS processing and settlement for which ACI’s current money transfer system is well-known.
MTS-eps will be built on IBM SmartSOA Foundation, IBM Information Management, and Tivoli services management middleware and consistent with the IBM payments framework for financial services architecture.
Ron Totaro, senior vice president at ACI, said: Our wholesale solutions strategy focuses on transforming the money transfer system into a true SOA solution. This step in our alliance with IBM brings us closer to our goal of creating a converged solution that serves the entire range of enterprise payments. With the recent announcement of ACI’s fraud detection solution becoming available on System z, ACI and IBM can offer a uniquely powerful solution to meet the end-to-end needs of wholesale payments processing.
