charges module, fraud detection and nostro and vostro and generic reconciliations components, plus exceptions and investigations support. It has XML and ISO 20022 support and an interface layer, Intellect Integrator. There is also a cheque truncation component, Intellect Business Process Studio (BPS), that can be used as a branch truncation solution encompassing instrument scanning, endorsement, IQA/IQU checks and data entry with validations at the capture branch for outward clearing.
One other complementary piece is Intellect Vigil, a risk management and decision support tool addressing interdict compliance.
The watch list filtering/text interpretation
engine screens transactions and customer portfolios against sanctions lists from regulatory bodies such as OFAC, World Check and Factiva plus lists as provided by the user. Polaris claims that the payment system is modular, so
can be taken in components as well as in its entirety. Barclays Bank, for instance, uses only the credit limits portion as a funds control hub (see below). Turning to the cards system, once more the origins go back to Citibank. The solution was developed in the late 1980s/ early 1990s when the bank started its card business in India. It was originally developed to support 60,000 Diners Club cards. By 2002 it had come to support 1.3 million diverse credit cards in this country. The rest of Citibank used the mainframe-based VisionPlus system; the Indian solution had been built at a time when IBM had no direct presence in the country.
Strategy
Work on the card system has been in the areas of multi-currency support (2008), EMV compliance (2009), support for prepaid cards and contactless devices, including mobile, and PSD-SS security standards. Another area of focus has been multi-organisation support. A major push is to sell the system on an ASP/on-demand basis, potentially over the cloud, particularly in India and South-East Asia, with market research also being done for Latin American countries, including Chile, Peru and Brazil. Liquidity management has been a relatively active area, with deals in this space in 2012 coming at First National Bank in South Africa, Karur Vysya Bank in India (which also signed for core banking), and National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia.
Uptake and customer experiences
At Citibank, the original payments system has come to span 45 countries, with volumes of 800,000 to one million payments per hour. There is one instance and it handles domestic and cross- border payments, with links to a wide range of ACHs, initiation channels and clearing and settlement mechanisms. Citibank remains on the older version of the system, not the J2EE version, and it is the largest user by a large distance. In total the system here is interfaced to around 15 channel solutions and around 200 other applications, including Flexcube Corporate, which now resides with Oracle FSS. The flagship commercial customer is Santander. It has the Intellect system as a routing layer for corporate banking, linked to multiple payment engines, such as Fundtech’s Global PayPlus, and back offices in Southern Europe and Latin America. The Intellect solution can handle consolidated files, routing the contents according to business rules. Disparate
payments can then be consolidated back into one file and dispatched to the client. The system supports SEPA Credit Transfers and SEPA Direct Debits. The contract was signed in early 2009 and, two years later, six countries were live, with Colombia about to follow. At Santander, the Polaris hub links customer-facing
transaction initiating channels to the back-end product processors. This would ultimately be to support all Latin American countries from a single deployment. It converts input messages from the channels into the formats required by the back-end processors with support for Edifact format and SAP iDOC messages. Overall, Polaris claims 50+ customers of at least some parts of its payments suite. A number of these are in the Middle East. For instance, Dubai Islamic Bank has the solution for domestic and cross-border payments, with interfaces to its core banking system, Flexcube, and SwiftAlliance. Reformatting at the bank is via Intellect Integrator.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com 193
It was an end-to-end system for issuing and acquiring.
Unlike the payments system, this solution was only ever used in India. In fact, it has been replaced at Citibank in the last few years by an overhauled version of VisionPlus, Enhanced Card System (ECS+), hosted by EDS in Singapore. This was blamed by Polaris on a standardisation of systems on an international basis by the bank. Once more, Polaris claims the solution has been moved to Java and SOA. This is at the front-end, to replace the Oracle Forms technology of the original version. This overhaul was done in 2003/4. However, the back-end is still Pro-C and PL/ SQL, with most of the batch processing using this technology. It can run on a range of platforms including Intel, IBM p Series, z Series, Solaris, AIX, Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX and Linux. In benchmarks with IBM, in its Innovation Labs in Bangalore, the system has been tested for 10 million cards. There is also support for Weblogic and Websphere. There are card issuing and acquiring modules, with other components for customer on-boarding, collections management, fraud detection, loyalty scheme management and chargeback lifecycle management. The issuing and acquiring portions can be sold separately. Some of the components, including collections and fraud detection (Vigil), are shared across other Polaris applications. The system has been benchmarked by IBM to support
more than ten million cards, twelve million transactions, 1000+ concurrent users and 450,000 merchant transactions per day.
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