‘several opportunities’ in the M&A space were evaluated. Fitzgerald said that the existing customers of Distra would not be pressured into buying ACI’s products and the original UPP would continue to be developed and maintained at the installed sites, with no end-dates projected. Distra had been set up in 1999, specialising in the development of high performance, high availability payment applications. Co-founders Craig Worrall and Larsen saw an opportunity to develop a solution that was not reliant on proprietary technologies. Their vision was to develop a platform that was agnostic in terms of hardware, operating system and database and would incorporate fault tolerance through the software, rather than requiring the traditional high-end, fault-tolerant hardware architecture configuration to achieve this. Larsen was regarded as a ‘Java guru’ and saw this as being the route forward – there was no real Java-based solution available at that time. Distra developed the frameworks for a number of applications, built around EFT payment requirements, and used these to develop a transaction processing platform. The company claimed that the solution had around 95 per cent of the functionality typically required by a bank. The remainder was added by Distra, the bank or a systems integrator to meet specific requirements usually through configuration, according to the supplier, rather than having to develop software code. If development was required, this was done in Java and XML. Distra touted UPP as an end-to-end payments solution, alongside or behind legacy systems. One scenario the company encountered was a bank retaining its legacy systems to handle the existing POS infrastructure but using Distra Switch to handle new products and channels, something that might potentially now happen with the old ACI systems. Under its own steam, Distra was positioning its solutions as possible wrappers for legacy systems, where banks were not ready to rip and replace. This could be as an orchestration layer, bringing improved flexibility, followed by a gradual migration of functionality into the new layer. According to Distra, its payments platform was designed with payments convergence in mind. It was touted as able to handle all types of payments and enable new payments channels to be introduced rapidly, regardless of the messaging type, structure or type of device from which the transaction originates. Distra also claimed real-time risk management across all ‘end points’ (device, network, incoming or outgoing source etc), across retail and wholesale activities. Similarly, the system supported real-time liquidity management across the payments environment. Managing liquidity was an important feature of the system


for the UK’s Faster Payments scheme. In addition to providing member banks with a gateway solution for online access


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


to the FPS infrastructure, the system maintains a real-time settlement position against the other member banks. The Faster Payments solution is marketed through Vocalink, which selected Distra as one of its technology partners. In June 2016, ACI Worldwide unveiled the next generation


of eCommerce payments with the launch of its UP eCommerce Payments solution. The SaaS-based UP eCommerce Payments solution is the result ACI’s acquisition of Retail Decisions (ReD) in 2014 and 2015 acquisition of PAY.ON. The system will allow merchants worldwide to capitalize on the $2.2 trillion global eCommerce opportunity using ACI’s global network of more than 350 alternative payment methods and acquirers in over 160 countries. In January 2017, ACI Worldwide went live with the latest version of its UP Immediate Payments solution. Following the launch, Rabobank announced that it would be implementing the ACI Solution to support SEPA instant payments. In November 2017, ACI announced support for accelerated adoption of The Clearing House (TCH) Real-time Payments (RTP®) system that went live the same week through the UP Immediate Payments Start UP program. The program offers a host of options to support on-ramp to RTP while managing investment with predictable costs. In December 2017, ACI became the first application


provider to to receive SWIFT gpi certification for the UP Real- Time Payments solution.


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