Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS) today announced a new Open Payments Platform to help banks transform their payment operations and more easily deliver new products in an ever-changing industry.
The Unisys Open Payments Platform enables banks to consolidate redundant payment functions to reduce infrastructure costs, better manage payments operations across multiple product lines, and adapt to changing regulatory requirements and market demands. The Open Payments Platform is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and takes advantage of the economies and efficiencies offered by open source software.
In developing the Open Payments Platform, which integrates technology from Unisys and leading industry partners, Unisys leverages its deep history in the payments industry and expertise in new SOA technology. The Open Payments Platform allows banks to transform their operations incrementally and efficiently, and moves their payments business from discrete back-office processes to integrated revenue streams that serve emerging client needs and can generate new income sources.
“By combining Unisys expertise in technology, systems integration and payments with other strategic partners in an open environment, we offer our clients a flexible road map to secure their payment business operations, and more easily adapt to changing market, regulatory and technology challenges,” said Curt Girod, president of Global Financial Services at Unisys. “We are committed to delivering agile solutions that not only improve banks’ payment businesses today, but also anticipate their needs of tomorrow.”
New Open Features and Partner Resources
The Unisys Open Payments Platform supports multiple technology choices for the underlying infrastructure and is compatible with operating systems that support standards-compliant J2EE Application Servers, Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL) engines, and relational databases.
To deliver industry-leading reusable payment services on its Open Payments Platform, Unisys has established a flexible alliance network of best-in-class partners. Among its strategic partners is Oracle, which offers SOA payment components, a robust Business Intelligence Suite, and a complete reference infrastructure for the Unisys Open Payments Platform.
Unisys and Oracle have jointly developed a Payment Business Intelligence accelerator that enables financial institutions to manage their payments business more effectively by monitoring key performance indicators (KPI) in enterprise-wide dashboards and reports.
“By providing quick and intelligent access to data across multiple products and business groups, Unisys and Oracle help banks transform payments from a back-office operation to a more enterprise-wide strategy to improve service to customers and identify new sales opportunities,“ said Sanjay Sadhu, senior director at Oracle and global manager of the Unisys alliance relationship.
In order to offer banks proven SOA-based payment solutions quickly, Unisys has become a global value-added reseller for payments industry innovator Clear2Pay. Clear2Pay’s Bank Payment Hub, re-usable SOA components, and industry standard interfaces are core parts of the Unisys Open Payments Platform.
“Unisys and Clear2Pay share a common view on the benefits of an open network that allows financial institutions to process payments through a centralized engine with reusable business services across all product lines, hence our unique dedication to building and implementing SOA-based solutions that meet any national and global payments requirement,” said Mark Hartley, vice president of strategy and marketing at Clear2Pay.
Unisys integrates, customizes, extends, and even hosts Clear2Pay products to offer solutions that process any type of payment, consolidate redundant payment processes, and provide new revenue generating solutions to help financial institutions address current industry trends such as Check 21, corporate to bank payments, cross-border remittance, and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) requirements.
“Unisys has a strong history of payments innovation. By delivering an enterprise view of the business, Unisys can provide financial institutions with the agility required to grow the payments franchise in the midst of unprecedented market changes,” said Colin Kerr, an analyst with TowerGroup, a leading independent research and advisory services firm that specializes in the financial services industry.
High-Volume Processing, Robust Security and Family of Solutions
In benchmark tests conducted with partners Oracle and Clear2Pay, Unisys demonstrated that its new Open Payments Platform, including the Clear2Pay Bank Payment Hub, can process more than 17 million electronic check images in the industry X9 standard, along with associated data, in 40 minutes. These high performance results achieved inbound and outbound payment throughput rates of 8,100 and 6,800 transactions per second, respectively.
To achieve these impressive results, the benchmark used Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers based on Intel processors and running the Clear2Pay Bank Payment Hub, the Oracle 10G Enterprise Database, IBM Websphere, Red Hat Linux, and the Unisys Safeguard 30m business continuance solution. The benchmark, which also included testing the secure, robust failover capability of the Open Payments Platform to ensure it keeps working within a site if any component fails, demonstrated reliable disaster recovery to a remote site in less than 30 minutes.*
The Unisys Open Payment Platform is part of a family of solutions that Unisys offers to provide banks with flexibility in transforming their payment operations. These include business process outsourcing services (BPO) in check and remittance processing, imaging and epayments, as well as SOA-based payments solutions such as the Unisys WebSourceNDP intelligent scanner and remote capture device and its companion SOA Vision Suite processing environment.
About Oracle
Oracle (Nasdaq GS:ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at www.oracle.com.
About Clear2Pay
Clear2Pay is an innovative payments technology company focused on delivering globally applicable solutions for secure, timely and streamlined payments processing. Clear2Pay's Open Payments Framework (OPF) enables financial institutions to improve internal payments processing efficiencies while at the same time provide their clients with better payment services that are faster, with richer payments related information. Clear2Pay's solutions within the Open Payments Framework such as the Bank Payment Hub offer financial institutions the ability to process payments through a centralized payments engine that utilizes a library of re-useable business services across all payment types. The bank can thus combine new services models with existing infrastructures, thereby protecting previous investments while gradually moving to a more modern efficient payments environment. Clear2Pay (B) operates out of more than 10 international offices and currently employs over 220 staff. More information is available on www.clear2pay.com.
About Unisys
Unisys is a worldwide technology services and solutions company. Our consultants apply Unisys expertise in consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, infrastructure, and server technology to help our clients achieve secure business operations. We build more secure organizations by creating visibility into clients’ business operations. Leveraging the Unisys 3D Visible Enterprise approach, we make visible the impact of their decisions – ahead of investments, opportunities, and risks. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.
*NOTE TO EDITORS: Additional information regarding the benchmark environment, scenarios, data and parameters is available upon request.
RELEASE NO.: 0416/8764
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/news_a_events/04168764.htm
Unisys is a registered trademark of Unisys Corporation. All other brands and products referenced herein are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
