broadest payments functionality’, but there were a few gaps, such as disputes management, that it would seek to fill. On each occasion, the decision would be to partner or build. ACI has also traditionally used local partners for distribution. S1 Corporation was a long-standing player in the branch systems and e-banking arena, with solutions in the latter for retail and corporate banking. It had also been fairly acquisitive and moved into payments with the purchase of Mosaic Software, in November 2004. This company brought its switch platform, Postilion, as well as a retail internet banking offering. The company claimed more than 325 deployments for its payment solutions across 300 banks, card issuers, merchant acquirers, retailers, and ATM deployers in more than 50 countries. Together, these customers processed over seven billion transactions annually, originating from more than 100,000 ATMs and 500,000 POS terminals. It claimed ten of the world’s top 15 banks as customers. One stated philosophy for payments was ‘any payment token, any transaction, any delivery channel’. Postilion delivered a multi-channel platform for consumer-
generated payments with support for EMV, contactless, prepaid, and gift cards. Postilion offers PCI DSS certified and PA-DSS compliant solutions. S1 also had channel banking solutions (its traditional area, across business, consumer,
Overall product strategy
Phase one of ACI’s strategy was to select one application per area and then set about making sure that these were tightly integrated. This means being able to offer combinations of packages, off-the-self, such as MTS with PRM, with consultancy to back this up. From a geographical perspective, there were 16 markets of focus in Q4 2010 but there was also the flexibility to target others if there was heightened activity (Turkey was cited as one example). Longer term, ACI was planning to break down its products into services and rationalise these. There were common pieces of functionality across the different products. The vendor identified 15 services, which it described as ‘the 15 key things needed to deliver a payment system’. There were then sub- pieces within the 15. The 15 comprised On-board, Interact, Direct, Track (with these four in the category of ‘Initiate’), Transact, Complete, Account, Govern (‘Manage’), Detect, Assess, Resolve (‘Secure’), Enable, Analyze, Ensure, Integrate (Operate). Mapping the products to these, Enterprise Banker and Commerce Gateway (for linking existing payment infrastructures with internet payments) were Initiate offerings, Base24-eps, MTS, Retail Commerce Server, Token Management and acquirer, issuer and interchange systems were Manage offerings, PRM and ACM were Secure, and Asset, Communication Services and Payment Service Management solutions were Operate solutions. An example of the sub-sets were those for Complete, which comprised Settle, Reconcile, Exception Handling, Repair and Manage Disputes.
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corporate, mobile and trade finance) plus others for lending (consumer, business and mortgages). For branch banking, it had teller, call centre and sales and service offerings. Traditionally, the company had been divided into two divisions, comprising Postilion and Enterprise, with the latter targetting large financial institutions. The company’s largest customer, for a range of services including hosting, had been State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company and its subsidiary, State Farm Bank, but this was due to end in 2011 (it contributed 16 per cent of S1’s revenue in 2009). S1 was seeking to head to a full Payments Services Hub with its platform, on a phased basis starting with an enhanced portal, then additional SOA services and enhanced integration. It was also looking to improve the limits functionality and to incorporate upcoming market requirements such as POS P2P encryption and support for new tokens and devices. Clearly, the merger with ACI brought these plans to a halt, as the S1 offerings came to join the mix of its new parent’s, high value and low value payment engines. In March 2017, ACI Worldwide and Payment21 teamed
up to offer anti-money laundering (AML) compliant Bitcoin payments. ACI will provide connectivity to more than 350 card acquirers and alternative payment methods via an integrated API.
Some areas had been prioritised for the move to services,
such as tracking for wholesale payments, either for a bank’s own purposes or for that bank to provide to its corporate customers. Areas of settlement and reconciliation were cited as likely to be other priorities. Phase two was just under way during 2012 and ACI expected to deliver components in the next year or two.
ACI has subsequently positioned Distra’s UPP (now
known as UP) as a wrapper solution. ‘UP is essentially a set of technologies and frameworks that provides purpose-built functionality to enable and orchestrate payments processing across
channels, currencies and networks,’ said Paul
Thomalla, MD and SVP for the EMEA region at ACI, in April 2013. Key attractive features of this offering were the speed of development and cost savings, he stated. ‘UP is the fulfilment of our vision that we’ve been working on for five years now.’ At this stage, discussions wereunderway with some potential takers in the UK (these were understood to be the existing customers of Distra). UP now sits as a wrapper around multiple legacy systems. It was available with MTS by April 2013, and later in the year was to be extended to Base24-eps. ‘Eventually, all our products will be UP enabled,’ said Thomalla.
The original UP/UPP, as a payments platform in its own right, would continue to be supported for the foreseeable future at the existing customers (there were about ten, including high-profile entities such as Nationwide Building Society and Barclays Bank in the UK, and NAB in Australia). It was no longer marketed as such, said Thomalla, but ‘is still available for those that want it’.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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