ACI Worldwide And VocaLink To Create Payments Network

ACI Worldwide, a global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, and VocaLink, a global payments systems company, announced on Tuesday (Sept. 27) a partnership to launch a domestic or regional immediate payments network.

In a press release, the companies said it is the first global strategic partnership of its kind and will offer participants a pre-integrated solution, enabling quicker onboarding to the payments scheme and broader reach to more scheme participants in a fast manner. As part of the partnership agreement, VocaLink will provide its Immediate Payments System solution and connectivity software to clearing houses and central banks globally; ACI will deliver its UP Immediate Payments solution, with VocaLink’s Immediate Payments Gateway pre-integrated to enable individual organizations, such as financial institutions and other payment providers, to access the scheme and process transactions.

VocaLink offers a solution for central infrastructures to manage the clearing of real-time payments according to the rules decided by a particular country or region. The solution supports the central infrastructures of the U.K. Faster Payments and the Singapore FAST schemes and is also being implemented in the U.S. at The Clearing House. ACI’s UP Immediate Payments solution addresses the end-to-end requirements of financial institutions and payment service providers, enabling them to integrate and manage their entire payments ecosystem through solution configuration.

“We have enjoyed a long relationship with VocaLink — collaborating on faster payments initiatives dating back to the first launch of Faster Payments in the U.K. This new joint effort allows organizations to leverage the benefits of real-time payments with certainty and also minimizes delivery risk,” said Craig Saks, group president of strategic products at ACI Worldwide, in the press release. “By providing our customers with a pre-certified solution that is already tightly integrated with the VocaLink IPS real-time payment system, we can simplify the challenge of real-time enablement that customers face and significantly reduce the integration required; this ensures that they are able to offer real-time payments to their customers as quickly as possible.”