Partnership with IBM
That IBM partnership stemmed from a global alliance forged in late 2007, swiftly followed by an extension in early 2008 which included IBM receiving warrants to purchase up to eight per cent of outstanding ACI shares. The news coincided with a financial statement from ACI which showed a poor performance for the quarter to 30th September, including an anticipated loss of $10.4 million.
ACI was a notable omission a couple of years earlier when
IBM announced its Enterprise Payments Platform (EPP), its Websphere and DB2-based, Service Oriented Architecture- centric payments strategy. At that stage, the main payments partners were cited as newer players, Clear2Pay and Dovetail, with a number of others for areas such as business activity monitoring and payment recall. ACI was mentioned in passing, along with Fundtech, as ‘aligning their offerings to IBM’s new platform’.
Within the latest tie-up, ACI committed to enhance MTS and Base24-eps for IBM’s System z platform including DB2, Websphere and Tivoli software. IBM would provide support for benchmarking and performance tuning. The two companies planned global sales and technical services teams, with the latter using IBM’s ‘migration factory’. ACI would also look to use IBM data centres for hosting, to facilitate the provision of its systems on an on-demand basis. The main target was financial services; also in the companies’ sights were retailers, for payment authentication, switching and loss prevention. Base24-eps already ran on the System z; MTS did not. Even
with Base24-eps, the most common platform was Hewlett- Packard. However, given that a lot of in-house developed systems are on IBM mainframe, the System z was seen as key to winning replacements. June Yee Felix, general manager for IBM’s banking solutions and strategy, said ACI’s non-appearance in the original EPP announcement was ‘just timing’ and it was always the intention of IBM and ACI that it would participate. She described EPP as the ‘foundation of our commitment to the marketplace’ and the latest announcement did not impact IBM’s relationship with Clear2Pay or Dovetail. ACI would now look at the architecture of its products so that services could be better exposed through EPP. In terms of IBM taking a stake in ACI, this somewhat
reversed the company’s withdrawal from such stakes some years earlier. A lot of shareholders and analysts had been criticising IBM for ‘making a lot of other people wealthy’, said Felix. In other words, IBM was losing out on some of the returns from its partnerships. For payments, the timing was perfect because of the current momentum, she said. The payments space had been fairly slow moving, even with SEPA, with lots of institutions studying their options. Now, there was a lot of upgrade activity as well as banks replacing home-grown and proprietary platforms, with the latter particularly under pressure because of regulators looking at operational risk. When the announcement was made in September 2012 that IBM was exercising its warrants, there were statements from both sides about the continued closeness of the relationship.
Other Partnerships In June 2016, ACI announced a collaboration with the UK-based Raphaels Bank to provide the bank access to the UK Faster
Payments Scheme using ACI’s UP Immediate Payments Solution. In August, ACI entered an integration agreement with Ethoca - a leading provider of technology solutions for card issuers and online merchants. ACI has integrated Ethoca Alerts, into its UP eCommerce Payments solution, making it available to payment service providers (PSPs) worldwide, and by extension, to the online merchants. The agreement complements ACI’s portfolio of fraud management solutions. At the same time ACI partnered with the City of Tallahassee (FL) to offer the City’s utilities customers a payment kiosk option to pay their utility bills with ease. ACI, in collaboration with Chicago-based QuotePro Inc., and the City; will provide cash, credit and debit card payment services through its UP Bill Payments solution. In September, ACI Worldwide entered a partnership with VocaLink to speed up adoption of immediate payments by FIs. The deal entailed combining VocaLink’s IPS solution for central payment infrastructures and ACI’s UP Immediate Payments solution. The solution supports the central infrastructures of the UK Faster Payments and the Singapore FAST
schemes.In the same month, ACI Worldwide partnered with HyperPay - a leading Payment Service Provider (PSP) and an ACI customer since 2013. The deal enabled HyperPay to use ACI’s UP eCommerce Payments solution to drive growth in the Middle East-North Africa region. ACI partnered with SWIFT for Alliance Lite2, a cloud-based connectivity to SWIFT which is available through a part of ACI’s UP Transaction Banking solution - Money Transfer System (MTS). The system will offer the SWIFT messaging suite and Alliance Lite2 as a fully integrated, end-to-end solution enabling banks to access the leading cross-border messaging network. ACI partnered with the Turkish Bank of UK to power them with ACI’s aggregator service for access to the UK Faster Payments Scheme in November 2017. The bank will use the service via ACI’s cloud-based delivery model run from its new European data centre, which opened in Limerick in October 2016. During the same month, ACI also became the technology partner of the Zelle Network. ACI will provide integration for Financial Institutions (FIs) to connect to Zelle, one of the leading U.S. Person-to-Person (P2P) payments networks.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com 29
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
