News

Fiserv launches CheckFree payments suite

May 19, 2008

BROOKFIELD, Wis. —CheckFree Services Corp., now part of Fiserv Inc., has launched the CheckFree International Payments Processing Suite — a suite of software products for financial institutions that offers a tool designed to assist FIs with regulatory and processing compliance.

According to news release, because of growth in the international payments market, NACHA has implemented a unique SEC code called International ACH Transaction to differentiate international payments from domestic transactions. In response, CheckFree developed its suite of products, which includes two stand-alone modules — the CheckFree AML AdvisorTM module and CheckFree IAT Format ValidationTM module.

"As globalization accelerates, international funds transfers are becoming more of a concern for businesses and the banks that serve them," said Aaron McPherson, practice director for Financial Insights, an IDC Company. "The new IAT code that goes into effect next March will provide new options, but also new challenges in the areas of money laundering and OFAC compliance."

By March 20, 2009, all financial-services organizations must comply with the new IAT regulatory coding and government mandates designed to help safeguard the U.S. financial system from abuses involving international payments, including money laundering and terrorist funding. As a result, companies must analyze information in the data fields and compare that information with government lists.

The International Payments Processing Suite of products addresses both types of challenges set forth by the IAT code.

The AML Advisor module incorporates the analysis of new IAT data fields and is designed to allow users to achieve a higher level of compliance without increasing processing or staffing costs. This module accepts IAT transaction data, compares it across multiple sanction lists and internally maintained "false positive" databases. The data-processing and analysis capabilities reduce the occurrence of false-positive results by employing relative correlation, or fuzzy logic, functionality to create match confidence scoring.

With a reduction in false positives, back-office investigative work, processing holds and unnecessary negative customer impact are reduced, CheckFree says.

"Increased adoption of international ACH payments, along with the new NACHA IAT format create opportunities for enhanced cross-channel OFAC monitoring and efficient payments processing within financial institutions," said Sam Robb, vice president of Global Payment Solutions at CheckFree. "This new suite of products is designed to assists banks and their corporate customers in ensuring regulatory and processing compliance with NACHA and OFAC, while helping to attract new corporate customers and strengthen the retention of existing ones."

The IAT Validation module will run as a value-added module to a customer's existing PEP+ application processing mainframe. The AML Advisor module will be integrated with core PEP+ processing, while the OFAC scanning functionality will be facilitated via messaging to a server-based solution.