taker was Fortis Bank; American Express Bank also used the system to process its European payments out of Frankfurt. The SEPA support for MTS was unveiled in May 2006. The main work needed was around scalability and extending the ACH processing capabilities. Linked to the first of these two aspects, ACI unveiled benchmark figures with IBM for the system, showing a throughput of 3.7 million payments per hour.


The improved throughput was based on concepts that


had evolved over a number of years, said ACI CTO, Tony Smith, particularly at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). A pilot at the bank ran for nine months and, while it did not result in a commercial roll-out, a lot was learnt, he said. The need, particularly with SEPA, was felt to be a hybrid payments architecture which could handle both large, complex cross- border payments and simple mass payments. ACI had adopted a ‘container’ concept. In the past, each payment was treated as a separate message and passed through the necessary complex workflows. For more simple payments, the idea is to group together similar ones, based on their key attributes, and process them together.


At the same time, based on input from banks in Europe,


there was also still likely to be the need for the payments in these containers to go through different processing stages, such as account validation and fraud checking, so this had been incorporated into the design. The benchmark tests were intended to replicate this model, said Smith, with multiple host interactions. They were carried out in IBM’s Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass, and used a 16 processor Unix server. While a large box, it was not top of the line, he said. There has been some chopping and changing of branding


of MTS. For a while there was ‘MTS-eps’ (and before this Base24-wps – Wholesale Payments System) but these brands were dropped. Unlike Base24-eps, MTS is not a new system, as the way forward for the wholesale system has been a gradual rebuild.


MTS underpinned ACI’s Swift bureau plans, with the company granted bureau status in October 2007. It started to offer services through its On-Demand SaaS model. In 2008, ACI signed an agreement with IBM to make MTS


available on the IBM System z hardware (see above). The plan for MTS was still being worked out at the time of the announcement but the fact that it runs on the IBM System p and that IBM’s AIX Unix can now run on a partition on the System z means this has become the mainframe route for MTS. Overall, the strategy for MTS is one of phased evolution. In the latter part of 2010, work was under way for enhanced bulk file management, additional work to expose functionality (e.g. sanctions monitoring) as services, and a ‘technology refresh’, of which DB2 support would be one part. Despite this activity, there seemed to be dwindling sales


for MTS and there were fewer announcements from ACI for this product than for most of its other flagships. For instance, in early 2008, ACI trumpeted 49 new customers in 2007 and gave a breakdown of most of these (eg. 14 for Base24-eps), but there was no mention of MTS. Jonathan Eber, director, product management for MTS, claimed 30 customers, including seven or eight in Europe, three in Australia and a recent first recruit, which he declined to name, in the Middle East, replacing Logica’s Bess. However, MTS was on the way out at this time at CBA in Australia, to be replaced by Clear2Pay’s Open Payment Framework, and would also be replaced, along with Base24, at BankWest, as this acquired bank was brought into CBA.


UP (formerly UPP)


Distra brought around 50 staff and offices in Singapore, the UK and the US. Its Universal Payments Platform (UPP) is a Java-based solution with a handful of prominent takers, such as Vocalink (already an ACI client) and Nationwide in the UK, Payfair in Belgium and National Australia Bank, which also was a minority shareholder in Distra until this sale. ACI subsequently rebranded the offering as UP (Universal Payments). Distra and ACI ‘occasionally competed with each other’,


said Kenneth Larsen, co-founder and CTO of Distra, at the time of the takeover, but he felt that by and large the two companies and their products were complementary. The sale stemmed from Distra’s desire to scale up the business, and once the team looked closer at ACI it realised that the two companies ‘share the same vision’. Larsen said he was ‘pleasantly surprised by the high level of alignment’. ‘Distra’s product will merge in seamlessly with ACI’s


offerings, which will drive customer retention, as it can be wrapped around the existing ACI products,’ Larsen explained. It would act as a payments services bus, ‘allowing all these products to work together and the UP-specific products as well’. Its role would be initially that of an enabler, he said. There would be no ‘big bang’ transformation. ‘It will be a very slow, low-risk transformational path but with immediate cost benefits’. Distra’s team was being incorporated into the ACI structure and no job losses were expected. Larsen took the position of chief architect. However, there was one notable departure, with Mike Aston, CEO of Distra, leaving after nearly twelve years with the firm. Scott Fitzgerald, vice president and head of marketing at ACI, said the acquisition was in line with the vendor’s ongoing ‘Agile Payments’ strategy, which aimed to create an integrated payment solution across all payment domains. ACI had been looking at the ways to accelerate this and Distra’s technology had the technical team ‘really excited’, said Fitzgerald. Both organic and inorganic routes were examined, he added, and


Payment Systems & Suppliers Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 33


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