ACI Worldwide is aiming to simplify the growing complexity of payments with the launch of its new Universal Payments Platform. Designed as an enterprise payments hub, the platform brings together multiple payment systems into a single interface, allowing banks, processors, and retailers to manage transactions more efficiently across channels, currencies, and networks. As payment types and customer expectations continue to expand, the need for flexible, scalable infrastructure has become more urgent. ACI’s latest offering reflects that shift, positioning integration and adaptability as key to helping organizations keep pace with rapid industry change.
ACI Worldwide Tuesday announced the availability of a new platform that helps its customers integrate different ACI payment solutions into a single, unifying interface.
The result is an enterprise payments hub that enables users to “accelerate time-to-market, reduce risk, drive revenue growth, and increase operational efficiencies,” according to an ACI statement. ACI’s strategy with Universal Payments is to support banks’, processors’, and retailers’ desires to enable new transaction types and methods of payment as market opportunities emerge. The Universal Payments Platform is enabled in part by technology assets that ACI gained through its acquisition of Distra in 2012.
From ACI’s press release:
“ACI is proud to build on our heritage of reliability and scalability to deliver a path to enterprise payments for our customers,” said Dan Frate, Executive Vice President, Global Markets and Product Management, ACI Worldwide. “With our UP strategy, ACI empowers customers with the control, choice and flexibility needed to face new challenges head on, turning industry disruption into a competitive advantage.”
The Universal Payments Platform is a solution that provides purpose-built payments functionality to orchestrate all aspects of payments processing for any payment type, any channel, any currency and any network. Combined with ACI’s leading solutions, it delivers a SOA-based architecture that bridges existing systems with future needs.
With Universal Payments Platform, customers can:
• Accelerate time to market for new products or offerings: Flexible GUI-based configuration tools simplify the task of interfacing to new endpoints, networks and devices – replacing the need for costly, hard-coded customizations.
• Realize an actionable view of their business data: A common payment object combined with workflow definition tools provides enterprise-wide visibility of customer relationships, risk profiles, fraud prevention and other key areas typically hidden within processing silos.
• Respond to compliance initiatives: Pre-built templates allow flexible adjustments to payment structures, protecting against lengthy development cycles when new regulatory initiatives are introduced.
As an example, an ACI customer might run individual software modules for Proactive Risk Manager, bill pay, ACH, foreign exchange, and a core system that all require distinct integrations with ACI’s Universal Online Banker and Money Transfer System. That customer could leverage the Universal Payment Platform to connect all modules one time to the enterprise hub, enabling more services with theoretically less work and ongoing cost.
Visit ACI’s website for more about the new offering and to download a whitepaper.
