Payment engine 8.0
SAP launched a major new release of its Payment Engine at the end of April 2014, reflecting the supplier’s decision to focus on this sector. SAP Payment Engine 8.0 was expected to go live later in the year within upgrade projects at a number of existing users and was also the target release for a number of new takers. SAP product expert, Kolja Ewering, said the decision to invest heavily in the platform stemmed from ‘very positive trends’ over the previous two years in the payments sector. SAP was looking to round out the platform as a full payments hub and, indeed, Ewering said SAP was now competing against the long-established payment system suppliers such as ACI, Clear2Pay and Dovetail. To this end, many of the additional features in 8.0 were with a view to the platform being provided as a standalone offering. An example was support for currency exchange, which is supported within SAP’s core banking platform but is often viewed by banks as residing in the payments operation. Aso added were standard user interfaces, part of a wider
SAP strategy to renew all of the interfaces across its products. Dubbed SAP U15, in the payments sphere the work included standard user interfaces for manual creation of payments, independent of core system, either from scratch or using templates; repair user interfaces; and a ‘management cockpit’ for monitoring transaction queues, errors, recalls and so on. On the functional side, SAP was claiming full cross-border support for 8.0. This included coverage of all messages and processes required for a Swift Ready payments label (the certification process was underway), support for non- financial messages such as queries, answers, advice of charges, and notice to receive, and integration of Standing Settlement Instructions (SSIs) from Accuity/BankSearchPlus for correspondent bank determination. Previously, the platform was typically viewed as being applicable for domestic and SEPA use, said Ewering. ATB was the main user to date of cross-border messaging and was in final testing of the SSI facility at the time of the launch of 8.0. Another enhancement was support for real-time payments for online channels. This includes immediate posting of internal transactions where accounts are distributed across multiple core banking systems and immediate processing of high-priority payments to external clearing systems. In the past, said Ewering, the platform was regarded primarily as a back-end solution, receiving transactions from any channel in batch, and while there was the ability to connect to online channels, this was via customisation, rather than the standard full real-time execution of 8.0. The new release also supported HANA, SAP’s
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aforementioned Sybase-derived in-memory platform. The platform was already scalable, said Ewering, citing Postbank, now with up to 30 million transactions per day purely for its own requirements aside from those of its two outsource customers (its parent, Deutsche Bank, and one of the additional Payment Engine users, HSH Nordbank). However, HANA-enablement promised a large additional performance improvement, he said. HANA is geared towards analytical processing, rather than transaction processing, so this was something of a surprise, he admitted. The precise improvement would only be known when the HANA version had been implemented in a live site, he added. The system is still available with Oracle and DB2 but, with HANA seen as strategic by SAP, it seemed clear that this would be SAP’s preferred platform going forward. One additional enhancement was integration with FSN.
The Payment Engine will be able to receive and process incoming payment orders as FSN web service calls, and generate status notifications and dispatch these to the original sender, also as FSN web service calls. The Payment Engine is now integrated with SAP’s lending systems, ERP platform (the latter potentially for linking to areas such as nostro and vostro accounts) and other applications, such as for liquidity management and channels, as well as FSN, Deposits Management and BCA/Deposits.
One additional niche enhancement was support for
Russian payment formats and processes. The work was linked to the requirements of several prospects here, although none had signed at the time of the 8.0 launch. Some of the Russian enhancements might also be applicable for neighbouring countries. There had also been work linked to German-specific and Target2 requirements.
As well as a number of local and regional partners,
CSC, Accenture and Infosys were cited as active around the Payment Engine, although there are not payments-specific partnerships. Further releases of Payment Engine were promised, with the platform seen as part of SAP’s overall banking strategy, both as an integrated component within wider SAP system roll-outs and as an offering in its own right.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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