ACI Strengthens Support For UnionPay Payments

Financial institutions now better able to service UnionPay’s rapidly growing global user base, while reducing infrastructure costs with ACI’s consumer payments clearing solution

ACI Worldwide, a leading international provider of electronic payment and banking systems, recently announced strengthened support for UnionPay, the largest card network in the world. ACI’s clearing solution, ACI Interchange, opens up new markets for financial institutions and processors by enabling support for UnionPay transactions while extending infrastructure options to include IBM System p AIX.

UnionPay has issued more than 3.5 billion cards worldwide (Nilson Report) and it is projected to continue its significant growth. UnionPay cards are accepted in more than 140 countries and its rapid growth presents a significant opportunity for financial institutions and processors facing revenue pressures or wanting to extend their commercial offerings with a growing brand. ACI Interchange already supports incoming and outgoing clearing and settlement processes for transactions underpinned by EMV and magnetic stripe payment cards for the major international schemes; this has now been extended to include UnionPay.

In addition to adding UnionPay support, ACI Interchange now also offers support for IBM System p AIX, which is in line with ACI’s end-to-end consumer payments solution. This enables lowering of IT costs through platform consolidation, while providing customers with more platform choice. Consolidated platform choice directly addresses reducing costs and simplifying infrastructure requirements, thus alleviating maintenance burdens and improving margins.

With ACI Interchange, financial institutions and processors worldwide are able to:

• Eliminate multiple systems with one solution that offers native support for all international payment networks
• Remove the burden of maintaining multiple scheme formats, regular scheme mandates and differences between scheme processing requirements
• Save substantial scheme fees and be proactively compliant with complex interchange requirements

“In collaboration with our customers, we have strengthened our clearing solution to open up new markets and lower costs,” said Jeff Hale, Senior Vice President, Retail Payments, ACI Worldwide. “Customers have previously benefited from using ACI Interchange to save on maintenance costs and reduce scheme fees, and now that we offer UnionPay, they can access this important and fast-growing network.&rdquo

About ACI Worldwide
ACI Worldwide powers electronic payments and banking for more than 5,000 financial institutions, retailers, billers and processors around the world. ACI software processes $13T in payments and securities transactions for more than 250 of the leading global retailers, and 21 of the world’s 25 largest banks. Through our comprehensive suite of software products and hosted services, we deliver a broad range of solutions for payments processing; card and merchant management; online banking; mobile, branch and voice banking; fraud detection; trade finance; and electronic bill presentment and payment. For more information, visit www.aciworldwide.com.