Product strategy
Fundtech carried out work over a few years on an SOA version of its core engine, which produced the Global PayPlus-SP (Services Platform) iteration. This had seen a lot of functionality exposed as services, said Ravich, ‘taking a lot of the back office and bringing it to the front’. IBM worked with the supplier on the project and was involved at the first notable taker of the new version, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (see below). The solution is intended to support consistent payment processing regardless of channel and provide users with complete transparency. Availability was announced for the second half of 2010. The project at BoA Merrill Lynch was on schedule, said Joe Mazzetti, Fundtech’s EVP for corporate development at the time, in October 2010. National Bank of Greece was also cited as this time as a taker of Global PayPlus-SP, with a first cut-over due the following month. The reworking of its offerings was meant to ultimately turn them into a single suite of services within an SOA framework which would come to span payments, cash management, financial messaging and financial supply chain. In October 2010, Fundtech announced that cash and liquidity management had been brought into the SOA model, derived from Global CashPlus. For liquidity management, notable progress came in Israel in 2007, with Global PayPlus Liquidity Manager forming part of the country’s RTGS solution, bringing uptake from ten banks by the end of the year. There was also work to provide standard access to mobile devices, as ‘natural applications’ for corporate banking. Fundtech introduced its first mobile corporate electronic banking suite, Mobile AccessPlus, at Sibos in Amsterdam in October 2010. The initial taker was existing Fundtech client, NatWest. It took the Accountis-derived Bacsactive-IP component for UK Bacs payments. The other components are Global CashPlus- Mobile, for cash and liquidity management, and Accountis EIP- Mobile, for electronic invoice presentment. These run as native applications, said Fundtech’s head of innovation, Rhys Jones, on all major devices. According to a survey of 320 treasury executives carried out by Fundtech and Aite Group, over 40 per cent were ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to use mobile corporate banking for basic transactions such as checking balances and transferring funds. There was also considerable interest in more advanced functions such as transaction approval and and payment initiation. Almost half said they would be willing to pay for the convenience of mobile cash management capabilities. The report concluded that while banks were being slow to offer this type of service, the demand appeared to be there. ‘Security is by far the number one concern,’ said Ravich. ‘For those that were not interested, that was the reason.’ At the same event, Oracle, Fundtech, and ERP connectivity specialist, Sierra Atlantic, announced a solution to integrate bank payments and receivables processing systems with corporate clients’ ERP systems. Oracle had been the catalyst as it sought to address the age-old problem of corporate-to-bank
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connectivity. The combined solution, dubbed Seamless STP, would see Sierra’s hosted BankON take in files from Oracle’s ERP systems and route them to Global PayPlus, sitting in front of a bank’s existing channels. Global PayPlus would pass the corporate payment instructions to banks around the world for payment execution. A bank could use Seamless STP to provide a single point of contact for its customers’ multi-bank relationships, thereby giving corporate treasurers a single view of their cashflows. The hosted nature of the service meant the partners were suggesting a short implementation cycle. California-based Sierra is a long-standing Oracle partner and, said Mazzetti, brought the knowledge of the different ERP systems. Oracle’s Fusion platform is also part of the proposal. He said there were no takers at this time but there were discussions with a couple of banks about pilot projects. The first takers might come from the existing Fundtech client base, he added. Fundtech also added a payment lifecycle dashboard for
Global PayPlus, which is intended to provide insight into aspects such as account positions, traffic status, technical status and other operational issues, including drawing information from third party systems. ‘We had it [the information] in there already,’ said Mazzetti, ‘but you had to go and fish it out.’
A notable partnership was signed in the second half of 2012, with the largest Swift service bureau provider in South- East Asia, Decillion Group (Singapore-based subsidiary of NEC). The deal was for Decillion to replace its existing Swift Alliance Gateway offering with the Fundtech platform. It would initially be targeted at new clients, with the view to then migrating existing customers (Decillion claimed 130 clients in 22 countries at the time of the deal). In mid-2012 Fundtech announced benchmarks with IBM
for Global PayPlus, carried out for a ‘tier one bank’. These saw 20 million payments (consumer and business low-value, such as ACH or SEPA transactions) processed in under two hours. The SOA and revamp work on the messaging side culminated in the launch in September 2013 of what was touted as the fourth generation version of the platform, now rebranded as Global Messaging Plus. Designed in Fundtech’s Swiss operation, it was positioned as SOA-based, making use of Google search technology, and with a future version, cited for 2015, intended to have ‘complete horizontal scalability’, handling three million transactions per hour, according to senior VP and general manager, Switzerland, Per Trifunovic. The first customer to go live on the new version was Swiss National Bank, alongside Global Compliance Plus. The latter offering, built on the messaging platform, acts as a filtering system for anti-money laundering. It can also be sold on a standalone basis. At the time of the launch of Global Messaging Plus and Global Compliance Plus, Fundtech expected the migration of 40 other banks on the Swiss hub in the next three months, followed by those in the US and Singapore during 2014, the
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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