News

Alaric International provides debit card facilities to Barbados credit union

February 18, 2008

LONDON, England — Alaric International, a supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry, announced that the Barbados Public Workers' Co-operative Credit Union Ltd., the largest island credit union, has gone live with the first phase of a major program to provide enhanced customer debit card facilities.

According to a news release, Alaric's Authentic EFT authorization and switching system was implemented by BPWCCUL to provide an online interface into the National Debit Switch, known as the Caribbean Integrated Financial Services network, run by the islands' major banks. CarIFS was initially instituted to facilitate debit switching capability among the commercial banks on the island, but has recently invited the credit unions to join the network. The entire project phase, from functional specification in September to certification and completion of the live production system in November, took two months. The physical implementation and testing was achieved in under four weeks.

Alaric's Authentic is a modern EFT authorization and routing system for issuers and acquirers of credit, debit, charge and prepaid cards. Authentic addresses the needs of banks, retailers and processors. Written entirely in Java and using open, relational databases, Authentic is platform independent. Authentic is designed with future business needs in mind, with an emphasis on user configuration rather than programming.