PARTNERS AND SOLUTIONS

Modern-day money
ACI Worldwide helps customers capitalize on electronic payments boom

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT ELECTRONIC PAYMENTS ARE ON a meteoric rise, but surprising numbers still appear from time to time. Consider a recent Global Insight study commissioned by ACI Worldwide. The findings suggest that the worldwide volume of electronic payments is growing at about four times gross domestic product, said Lynn Holland, vice president of Global Product Marketing at ACI. For example, the United States is expected to have a compound annual transaction growth of 12.4 percent through 2009, with a compound GDP target of 3.3 percent. China is growing at 31.6 percent compound annual growth rate in transactions and an 8.1 percent compound annual growth rate in GDP. So theres significant sustained growth in this segment.

This growth is driving massive change throughout the payments industry. There are new transaction sources, including a proliferation of prepaid gift card options across multiple vertical market segments. There is an expanding cadre of regulatory requirements, such as the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) that aims to rationalize cross-border payments in the European Union. There are new payment mechanisms, including mobile payments. There is a strong move toward the convergence of retail and wholesale systems for greater payments productivity. There is more focus on improved data privacy and security, and on ways to mitigate consumer fraud and enterprise risk. And globalization is driving industry consolidation while creating a plethora of disparate systems with different capabilities and incompatible cost structures.

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 If

applications are devolved into

services and properly orchestrated, the cost and time required to maintain and enhance enterprise software should diminish considerably. SOA promises to make it much easier to enhance, extend, and manage the solutions that a customer is deploying.
Lynn Holland, VP of Global Product Marketing, ACI

ACI Worldwide helps enterprises cope successfully with change in the electronic payments world through a portfolio of mature, proven solutions. We are the leading global provider of payments software, said Holland. Our focus is on retail and wholesale payments, along with strong solutions in fraud and risk detection and management. We see ourselves as the gold standard in payments processing, providing the fundamental characteristics of scalability, availability, and reliabilityattributes that are synonymous with the HP NonStop platform. As it happens, ACIs flagship BASE24 product was developed for the NonStop platform. The newer BASE24-eps suite is a multiplatform offering, but Holland makes it clear that ACI is not turning away from its heritage. One of the fundamental principles of both NonStop technology and our BASE24-eps application is the requirement for 24x7 availability. Scalability is critical to support business growth, and flexibility is needed to support global deployments and multichannel architectures. The NonStop platformincluding the HP

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Integrity NonStop serveris ideally suited to handle these core competencies in the financial services market, where ACI and HP share a long history of delivering joint solutions.
SOA ENABLEMENT

At the highest level, ACI breaks down its products into four main sets. First are the BASE24 and BASE24-eps retail payment engines. Then come fraud and risk management products, including the ACI Proactive Risk Manager and Automated Case Management solutions. Third are payments management solutions for card issuance, chip card personalization, the clearing and settling of transactions, and other payments-enabling and post-authorization functions. Finally, wholesale banking solutions provide a complete online banking system from consumer and small business to high net wealth individuals and corporate bankingand a global money transfer system. Overall, ACIs portfolio comprises more than two dozen products. There is nothing static about this portfolio. We are constantly enhancing our solutions to meet enterprise architecture standards, said Holland. For example, we are adopting new and modern integration and orchestration techniques such as service-oriented architecture, or SOA. ACI is actively selling, implementing, and installing secure SOA enablement solutions for its applications on the NonStop platform. These solutions make it possible for users to simply invoke business logic and request specific information, providing a new level of access to the underlying payments infrastructure by many different groups within the enterprise.

Emerging payment infrastructures

Application software from ACI Worldwide is widely used and well respected by leading banks, merchants, and card issuers around the world, and the company continues to expand its horizons. There are areas of the globe with emerging payment infrastructures places like India, China, and the Asian Rim countries that are making a significant contribution to the growth in electronic payments, said Lynn Holland, ACIs vice president of Global Product Marketing. The initial infrastructures are being deployed to move from a cash-based system to an electronic payment and card system. ACI is front and center in these developing areas. A case in point is Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS), which recently selected ACIs BASE24-eps software to drive the Nigeria Central Switch. NIBSS, the leading interbank payment and settlement company in Nigeria, will implement

The idea is to move everything away

from the multiday window for clearing and settling a transaction to the real-time model thats available today in the wire and debit world.
Lynn Holland, VP of Global Product Marketing, ACI

BASE24-eps to provide interconnectivity and interoperability among electronic funds transfer switches in the country. The platform will also support a seamless integration of the Nigeria retail payment system with the West African Monetary Zone retail payment platform. NIBSS purchased the Integrity NonStop NS1000 server for BASE24-eps and has added another NS1000 server for ACI Proactive Risk Manager (PRM).

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 We see ourselves as the

gold

standard in payments processing, providing the fundamental characteristics of scalability, availability, and reliability attributes that are synonymous with the HP NonStop platform.
Lynn Holland, VP of Global Product Marketing, ACI

SOA also addresses the long-term cost structure of software, according to Holland: If applications are devolved into services and properly orchestrated, the cost and time required to maintain and enhance enterprise software should diminish considerably. SOA promises to make it much easier to enhance, extend, and manage the solutions that a customer is deploying.
PAYMENTS MODERNIZATION

One market vision that ACI is discussing with customers and analysts is that of wholesale and retail payments converging into a single infrastructure. The idea is to move everything away from the multiday window for clearing and settling a transaction to the real-time model thats available today in the wire and debit world, said Holland. The industry is migrating these payment vehicles toward a common ground. HP agrees with ACIs strategy and has active initiatives and solutions in place to support the payments convergence movement. Not that it will be easy. Thanks to globalization and growth, most organizations are currently struggling just to rationalize their retail payment systems, continued Holland. Its not uncommon for a bank to have 10 different retail payment engines as the result of acquisitions and specialpurpose point solutions. On the other side of the house, it might have five different wholesale payment engines. There is a significant effort underway now for global banks to converge within each silo. We believe the longer-term vision is that the silos will come together, driven by the need for greater payments productivity. Enterprises have to be more productive theyre always asked to deliver more products, support more channels, comply with more regulations, and drive more volume for the same or decreasing budgets. They need the ability to process payments in the most costeffective manner. With our world-class products, deep expertise, and global reach, HP and ACI are uniquely positioned to help address these challenges. N

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