EFT Replacement

Institutions’ existing card payment systems are often based on aged technology, with both custom developed and product based solutions often still based on software which has changed little since the 1970s and 1980s.

As legacy skills become scarce, such systems are becoming increasingly expensive to support and modify with long elapsed times to implement even simple changes or new functionality let alone to integrate new payment channels – in short, such systems are becoming a drag on business agility making it hard to sustain competitive edge.

The trend of replacing long serving payment systems with more modern solutions has rapidly accelerated as a result of acquisition activity in the EFT software vendor market - the market has consolidated and the number of available solutions has reduced as a result of multiple acquisitions (including TSAI’s acquisition first of S2 (2005), then of EPS (2006), EFD’s acquisition of Oasis (2003) and S1’s acquisition of Mosaic Software (2004)). Post acquisition, these vendors have been rationalizing their product sets with some products (including some of relatively recent origin) being sunsetted and support for them curtailed.

This means that, for many institutions, their core, mission critical systems have only a limited support life remaining – not surprisingly, acquiring a replacement system is fast becoming a priority agenda item.

For institutions contemplating system replacement it may come as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the “modern” replacement solutions touted by their incumbent suppliers, in fact, are far from modern, having their origins firmly rooted in late ‘80s and early ‘90s technology – object oriented design, platform independence and user configurability (together with their attendant advantages in terms of enhanced business agility and cost) are noticeable by their absence in these “modern” solutions.

Fortunately, Alaric is able offer a powerful alternative in its Authentic product.

Authentic is a fully featured system supporting issuing, acquiring and routing for financial institutions, retailers and processors.

Written 100% in Java and ising SOA, Authentic scales to meet the performance requirements of the largest institutions and is platform independent. Moreover, Authentic has been designed with configurability in mind, ranging from messaging through business rules through to the way that processing logic is defined, all of which are configurable (rather than programmed) and all of which lead to rapid development and deployment and greatly increased business agility. Alaric is well versed in effecting staged migrations from legacy applications to Authentic and provides a range of ancillary tools to ease this process and to minimize execution risk.

Most importantly, Authentic is built for the future. It uses today’s technology rather than the obsolescent technologies adopted by other “modern” offerings.