News

ACI develops payments system for SEPA

April 18, 2006

OMAHA, Neb. - ACI Worldwide announced in a news release the launch of the ACI Wholesale Payments System for SEPA, a global payments processing engine that supports processing for prieuro, credeuro and Pan-European direct debits and country-specific formats.

The SEPA initiative for a pan-European infrastructure calls for the creation of a euro area in which all payments are domestic, and the current differentiation between national and cross-border payments no longer exists. The SEPA project not only aims to improve the efficiency of cross-border payments but also aims to develop common instruments, standards, procedures and infrastructures to foster substantial economies of scale. As a result, payment banks throughout the Eurozone will need to invest in technology with the capacity to support high-volume SEPA transactions by 2010.

ACI's system for SEPA offers an integrated solution for domestic and international payments that supports the high-throughput capabilities needed for this initiative. As the back-office processing engine, the system supports payment-capture, enrichment, routing and settlement of bulk and individual real-time payments in a variety of configurations. Various aspects of processing - including funds control, risk and approval, foreign exchange rate calculations, black-list checking, and liquidity control - are managed as a set of services in a workflow configured by the financial institution.

The solution assists with the transition from a country-specific ACH environment to an environment where one or many pan-European automated clearing houses exist.

"It is unlikely that all traffic - created as a result of the SEPA initiative - can be migrated in a single phase," said Anthony Smith, chief technical officer for wholesale payments at ACI. "Rather, there will be a time when old and new systems must coexist, and customer service cannot suffer. The ACI Wholesale Payments System for SEPA is designed to accommodate the transition period by interoperating with legacy formats and systems."

To validate the performance and scalability of the new system, ACI concluded a proof of concept benchmark study at IBM's Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass.

The goal of the project: to prove the system's architecture and payment-flow support the throughput capabilities required for high-volume ACH payments in real-world scenarios. The study successfully achieved more than 3.7 million payments per hour.

The solution and proof of concept study were featured topics at a SEPA workshop hosted by ACI in Brussels, Belgium, last month. Attendees determined that merely being SEPA-compliant will not be enough.

"Due to the massive impact of SEPA changes, banks have to reconsider their in/outsourcing strategy to mitigate negative cost effects," said Robert van Bergen, a senior consultant at Capgemini.