The background of the two EPS founders was within German card payments processor, GZS, which was acquired by First Data. Development of the EPS platform had started in 1996, within a small group of developers; EPS bought the intellectual property rights to this and gained an initial four takers in 2000. The first to go live, after a six month project, was First-e, a now defunct Irish internet bank, followed by UBS.
ACI approached EPS, said Praschinger. However, EPS was
already coming round to the idea of gaining greater reach. ‘We had the feeling that to get big international deals we needed a global presence,’ he said. This was for delivering, supporting and maintaining its systems across the globe. ‘It is a big obstacle for a small entity.’ In terms of overlap in the product sets, at the core payment engine level, the mid- to long-term strategy would be best of breed, he said, so there would be some form of consolidated platform.
By October 2006, ACI was talking about Base24-eps
(electronic payment system) as the way forward (ACI on occasions referred to Base24-eps as ‘formerly Base24-es’). It is difficult to know what was from the Base24-es route and the EPS route (the renaming as Base24-eps meant it was easy to conclude that the German system was a contributor). Either way, at this stage Base24-eps was officially reclassified as a ‘Category A’ product, meaning it was deemed to be sufficiently mature for revenue to be recognised at the time of product shipment rather than customer acceptance. To push it as the successor to Base24 was a brave decision. Base24-eps was described as having been built from the bottom up. It is C++- based, as stated, with the reason for the use of this technology given as reliability. In terms of migrations from Base24 to Base24-eps, some users have moved across. ACI’s director, solutions marketing at the time, Andy Brown, said in September 2010: ‘It is a case of finding a time that is relevant to their businesses.’ In many cases, Base24 has been in place for a decade or more and at many sites there have been a lot of extensions and customisation. The system has also become tightly embedded in many organisations, often with point-to-point interfaces. The core Base24 functionality is available in Base24-eps but the newer system is considerably less well travelled than the older, so there are particularly some country requirements that will be missing, including message formats. This is being addressed. In a new release in October 2009, for instance, ACI promised support for market requirements in Australia, China, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, Spain and the US. Base24- eps provides a single view of account activity and balances, and handles both ATM and POS issuing and acquiring of private label and international card scheme traffic. It allows retailers, financial institutions and processors to authorise on-us transactions and switch not-on-us transactions out to
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the appropriate international card scheme or other domestic issuer systems.
One benefit of Base24-eps is that it can run on multiple platforms, including HP’s Tandem-derived NonStop, which might ease the choice for Base24 clients that want to do a phased migration. Base24-eps also runs on Sun Solaris and HP-UX, as well as IBM’s System z and System p. Overall, by January 2012, ACI claimed around 89 takers of Base24-eps (in May 2009, it had said it had 40 live sites). ACI claimed one customer processing more than 26 million transactions per day, with peak rates of more than 700 transactions per second. Another customer was managing 2250 ATMs. Five of the UK banks in the Faster Payments initiative had selected a solution spanning MTS and Base24- eps, including LloydsTSB, while ABSA Bank in South Africa had implemented it for issuer processing, starting a phased migration from Base24. A large European retailer had it for acquiring, switching and authorisation. Crédit Agricole has a highly strategic roll-out of Base24-eps, which started in 2009 (see below). In March 2014, ACI announced the launch of the new version of Base24-eps, version 2.0. Mitch Armstrong, director soutions consulting, hoped that this would be the ‘tipping point’ for Base24 classic users to move to Base24-eps. The new release included full integration of UP (see below), and functional enhancements including person-to-person and mobile payments in real-time.
MTS
The Money Transfer System (MTS) stemmed from ACI’s acquisition of Intranet Worldwide, with the corporate brand killed off within a restructuring by ACI in November 2005. Prior to the arrival of MTS, ACI had a Tandem-based wholesale payments offering called MoneyNet, but MTS was positioned as the successor. Some MoneyNet customers moved across, others went elsewhere (United Missouri Bank, for instance, moved from MoneyNet to Fundtech’s PayPlus, with MTS rejected at the shortlist stage in 2001). MTS is a multi-bank and multi-currency global payments
processing and risk management system. It has interfaces to SwiftNet, plus multiple RTGS and low-value networks, so can span domestic and international payments processing. It also supports processing for SEPA Credit Transfers and Direct Debits. It started on DEC VAX under VMS but was ported to Unix. Today, it can use Oracle for record keeping and has a proprietary data store, built by Intranet, for transactions. The user base of MTS was largely in the US. By 2007, ACI could claim MTS was used by 15 of the top 25 US banks for high-value and bulk payments processing and as a hub for payment switching. In Europe, the largest and broadest
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
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