IBM Partners With ACI On SOA-Based Payments SystemIBM Partners With ACI On SOA-Based Payments System

IBM on Monday said it has partnered with ACI Worldwide in building electronic payment systems that are based on a service-oriented architecture to make it easier to share payment information across banking applications. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the deal, ACI will tailor its money transfer system and BASE24-eps application to run on IBM's System z mainframe hardware. The companies plan to form joint sales and technical teams for selling the combined technologies, and for helping companies migrate legacy systems to the new products.

In addition, ACI plans to host the new systems in IBM's data centers to offer them as an Internet-based service for those companies looking for an alternative to an in-house managed system.

Besides System z, the joint products will leverage IBM's DB2 database, WebSphere middleware, Tivoli management software, and Crypto-chip technology. The latter are special cryptographic processors for data encryption.

The alliance is focused primarily on the financial services industry, targeting banks that are trying to manage old payments systems running on legacy platforms that are difficult to integrate with newer systems and are expensive to maintain, IBM said.

ACI and IBM plan to offer an SOA approach for integration. SOA uses technology based on extensible markup language, or XML, to loosely couple systems for passing data between them.

While banks are a key customer target, the partners also plan to approach retailers who require "highly available, scalable solutions for payment authentication, switching, and loss prevention," the partners said in a statement. Customers working with the new alliance include El Corte Ingles, among the largest Spanish retailers, with more than 30,000 point of sale terminals.

Phase one of the partnership is expected to yield an optimized version of BASE24-eps on System z to acquire, route, and authorize payments online; a wholesale payments system to help European companies meet pending Single Euro Payments Area regulations; and a real-time fraud detection system.

Subsequent systems will focus on dispute management, smart card management, online banking, and trade finance.