transactions and enhanced monitoring capabilities were among the drivers. The bank replaced several messaging gateways with the hub as it sought improved efficiency and consistency across all operations and products. BNP Paribas Fortis is a long-standing user of MTS, which supports its international payments hub in a shared services centre in Belgium. By summer 2011, an upgrade to a new version was under way, with completion set for Q1 2012. Around the same time the bank’s parent, BNP Paribas Group, embarked on a study to select a platform for handling its international payments. Francis De Roeck, head of payments business services at BNP Paribas Fortis, said that MTS was one of the candidates for this. There were also plans to extend BNP Paribas Fortis’ payment processing services for financial institutions to a wider market. At BNP Paribas Fortis, the set-up of the payments hub is such that all payments go in via a ‘switch and converter box’ that dynamically routes transactions to the optimal payments engine: ACI’s MTS or the in-house developed SEPA processing solution. Originally, MTS supported some SEPA payments but the bank developed a standalone system to deal with ‘low-value, high-volume, standardised SEPA transactions’, said De Roeck. Meanwhile, the MTS platform is focused on complex payments as it is configured specifically for ‘a different, transaction-based principle’. International payments that have unique features and require individual approach, analysis and processing via specific channels (for example, a correspondent banking mechanism or a clearing house) are automatically routed to MTS which is linked to multiple input and output channels and converters. The bank made significant investment in the payments system, said De Roeck. The result, he claimed, is a ‘very reliable’ platform with STP rates of ‘over 95 per cent’.
National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) selected MTS for corporate
and consumer payments in mid-September 2011. The selection saw the circulation of an RFP in late 2010 and vendor presentations early 2011. The bank was seeking to replace an in-house system and IBM’s Merva. ‘There was a lot of functionality that needed to be upgraded,’ said ACI’s wholesale solutions head, EMEA, Craig Ramsay. It was four ‘usual suspects’ at the shortlist stage, he said. This was the second taker of MTS in the Middle East after a win the previous year at an unnamed bank but NBK was expected to be the first to cut over. The project was expected to take around four months. The bank was already a customer of ACI, with Base24 in place for a long while. It had then added the PRM fraud detection system in 2010. Integration of MTS would be through NBK’s I-HUB
messaging layer. The bank is an advocate of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach and uses I-HUB as one component, to facilitate the exposure of functionality as web services. Among other systems, MTS will be interfaced via I-HUB to TCS’s Bancs core banking system. MTS was being
installed on IBM’s p System with the AIX version of Unix. Elsewhere, Standard Chartered Bank had recently
upgraded to the latest version of MTS, 4.0, in Germany for its Euro clearing. Standard Chartered was a long-standing user of MTS, as was American Express Bank. When the former acquired the latter in 2008, it was decided to standardise on a central hub for all European processing in Frankfurt. The cut- over to 4.0 was the culmination of this vision. For the S1 products, Banco Occidental de Descuento in
Venezuela was notable as it replaced Base24 with the Postilion- derived platform, using it across ATM and POS terminal driving, payment switching and card management. The initial work was done towards the end of 2005 but, according to SVP and GM of Postilion Payments, Francois van Schoor, ‘the real contract really kicked off at the end of 2006’. It was not until June 2007 that the project implementation began, and the bank started piloting the system the following June. It took a phased approach and had about 35 per cent of the devices rolled out by the end of August. The bank had been using the classic version of Base24 from ACI on a Tandem box. According to van Schoor, there were three reasons for the bank looking to move off this platform: flexibility, resources and cost. It launched an RFP and evaluated offerings from ACI and eFunds plus some local vendors before selecting Postilion through its local partner, Advance Service International (ADSI). On top of the ATM and POS side, the bank also took
Postilion’s payments back office functionality. This was ‘quite a big requirement’ for the bank. It needed to gain the necessary management information from the system, something that van Schoor described as ‘severely lacking on the Base24 system’. Van Schoor said this was ‘a very significant win’ for the vendor. He claimed Postilion had provided the bank with ‘a modern open system platform’. He believed the bank would see benefits particularly in available resources, ease of modification and cost. ‘The total operational cost of the new system is significantly lower.’ Latin America was a region of strength for Postilion. For instance, new deals in the second half of 2009 were at Banco Banorte, Banco Micasa and Banco Corp Banca all in Venezuela, and Banco Mercantil Santa Cruz, its first win in Bolivia. Banco Micasa and Banco Mercantil Santa Cruz took Postilion to drive their ATMs and connect to card networks, both debit and credit. Banco Banorte and Banco Corp Banca took it for authorisation and merchant processing. All the banks were scheduled to go live in the first quarter of 2009. The bulk of the implementation work was done by local partner, ADSI, with Postilion providing some consulting services. The Postilion system is also used by third party payment
processors. For instance, Ugandan payments processor, Bankom, took the platform for switching and processing transactions, going live in 2008 on behalf of four banks in the country. Postilion has around 100 clients in the region and is present in 15 countries. According to Mark McMurtrie,
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
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