Product suite
FIS’s solutions are firmly in the retail payments arena and particularly stem from Certegy, eFunds and now Metavante. Its offerings span all forms of retail payments, including debit, credit and prepaid cards, and are based on a range of technologies. Around 60 per cent of FIS’s US business is payments,
where it is a huge processor. It is also a strong player in Asia and Australasia. In Europe, its business is somewhat more balanced, in part through its German-specific Kordoba core banking business. In the Middle East, it has a reasonable number of payment system users, typically on a licence basis. FIS covers both the acquiring and switching sides of the
sector. There is some overlap between the applications but the positioning is reasonably clear. On the switch side, the eFunds-derived Connex is one
of FIS’s long-established workhorses. It runs on Hewlett- Packard’s Tandem-derived NonStop or IBM zOS platforms, with flat files or DB2, and is written in Cobol and Assembler at the back-end. Not surprisingly, it is used by large banks, such as RBS, or large national switches, such as Vocalink in the UK, where it underpins the largest ATM network in the world and this ACH’s Faster Payments scheme. There are between 40 and 50 licence users but the number of banks that it supports is much higher, largely due to its use in the US on a bureau basis to support around 9000 banks. At Société Générale, Connex has been steadily rolled out from one hub for multiple countries (around 14, with Ghana the latest to be added) to support the bank’s BHFM subsidiary, which was set up in the late 1990s to manage all of the French bank’s foreign retail banking operations.
The open systems equivalent of Connex is another eFunds- derived platform, IST (eFunds itself had been an acquisitive company and this was one business that it had bought). Functionally, Connex and IST are similar. The IST back-end is written in C++ and it runs on HP and IBM Unix as well as the mainframe, and supports both Oracle and DB2. Users include the Saudi Monetary Authority and the Finnish and Turkish national switches. The IST/Switch solution provides switching, routing and authorisation for issuing, acquiring and network participants for ATM/POS, debit, credit and Web transactions. It can process credit/debit transactions through all major card associations and networks, including Visa, MasterCard, Interac, American Express, Diners Club, JCB, STAR and NYCE. The IST suite comprises: FIS IST/Merchant Accounting &
Settlement for integration of payment transaction processing with back office accounting and general ledger systems; FIS IST/Clearing for crediting merchant accounts and debiting cardholder accounts; and the core FIS IST/Switch, a payment engine that handles payment authorisation processing. Collectively, eFunds’ suite was branded as the Enterprise
Payments Platform, comprising Connex, IST/Switch, Data Navigator, Fraud Navigator and EnterpriseView. As a result of an alliance with IBM, these were made available in 2007 on the IBM zSeries mainframe, with support for Linux on this platform, plus IBM’s WebSphere application integration middleware and DB2 at the database level.
160
On the credit card side, FIS’s offering is the mainframe- based Base2000, which competes with the other heavyweights, First Data and T-Sys. This stemmed from Certegy, and it covers transaction authorisation, statement generation, card issuance and customer service. Base2000 supports both consumer and commercial accounts, including business, corporate, fleet and purchasing cards. First installed in 1998, Base2000 processes more than 56 million accounts worldwide.
Cortex is Fidelity’s debit card solution. It is Unix-based and also covers prepaid and credit cards (the latter being an area of overlap with Base2000). Cortex stemmed from UK- based Nomad, which, as mentioned, had been acquired by Metavante in early 2008, for $58 million. The Cortex business is a high-growth one for FIS, on the back of the shift from credit to debit cards. The customers have become more mainstream and this part of the business was expected to grow by 30 per cent in 2010. That Cortex is fairly well-travelled is reflected in the fact that it has been integrated with a number of core banking systems, including Fidelity’s Profile, plus Misys’ Equation and Bankmaster, Oracle FSS’s Flexcube and Temenos’ T24. It also underpins a number of prepaid card providers, such as Advanced Payment Solutions in the UK. FIS claims it can support Instant Issuance, with the
production of fully personalised EMV cards in branch locations (this capability was launched for Asia in April 2010). Historically, card issuance for new and replacement credit and debit cards has taken up to two weeks. FIS’s Instant Issuance product operates as a stand-alone solution or as part of the overall Cortex card management system. Around
these processing systems, FIS has other
applications for fraud management and MIS. The fraud offering, Fraud Navigator, came with eFunds and is relatively low-end, so does not compete with more complex offerings from the likes of Fair Isaac and Actimize (indeed, FIS has partnered with the latter on bids and signed a partnership in 2008). Fraud Navigator is often used alongside IST. The MIS offering, also with eFunds roots, is Data Navigator,
a transaction database (Oracle), populated from near real- time or batch feeds from transaction processing systems, which is used to drive transaction enquiries, settlement and card scheme exception management. Understandably, Data Navigator has been integrated with FIS’s own systems and it is a common component alongside these (Vocalink, for instance, uses it with Connex, with Data Navigator constituting an enquiry database for UK financial institutions). Derived from EFD, FIS also has a US risk management line including ChexSystems, a service used by more than 9000 US financial institutions. ChexSystems is built around a database of closed-for-cause bank accounts. When a new customer opens an account at a bank, the bank can query the database on whether that customer has a history of defrauding or otherwise troubling other banks with bad cheques. Another popular service is the SCAN cheque verification network for retail merchants. Merchants use SCAN to help when deciding whether or not to accept a paper cheque for payment at the point of sale. SCAN returns a verdict on the validity of the cheque.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224 |
Page 225 |
Page 226 |
Page 227 |
Page 228 |
Page 229 |
Page 230 |
Page 231 |
Page 232 |
Page 233 |
Page 234 |
Page 235 |
Page 236 |
Page 237 |
Page 238 |
Page 239 |
Page 240 |
Page 241 |
Page 242 |
Page 243 |
Page 244 |
Page 245 |
Page 246 |
Page 247 |
Page 248 |
Page 249 |
Page 250 |
Page 251 |
Page 252 |
Page 253 |
Page 254 |
Page 255 |
Page 256 |
Page 257 |
Page 258 |
Page 259 |
Page 260 |
Page 261 |
Page 262 |
Page 263 |
Page 264 |
Page 265 |
Page 266 |
Page 267 |
Page 268 |
Page 269 |
Page 270 |
Page 271 |
Page 272 |
Page 273 |
Page 274 |
Page 275 |
Page 276 |
Page 277 |
Page 278 |
Page 279 |
Page 280 |
Page 281 |
Page 282 |
Page 283 |
Page 284 |
Page 285 |
Page 286 |
Page 287 |
Page 288 |
Page 289 |
Page 290 |
Page 291 |
Page 292 |
Page 293
