Payments Landscape Going Universal

The payments industry is increasingly moving toward an omnichannel landscape, where transactions are expected to be accepted across any number of entities, in any number of locations, 24 hours a day and all year round. Such advances take some doing, and technology must do most of the heavy lifting, especially in facilitating eCommerce and especially globally.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Nick Barnes, senior vice president of ACI Worldwide’s retail banking division, said that payments technology, especially for banks, has been evolving to embrace the “any-to-any” or “universal” format, wherein the lines can be blurred between transactions between B2B, B2C or C2C designations.

“There’s a global situation setting in,” Barnes told PYMNTS, “where many decades of relative stability in the payments market is over now, and there has been a massive proliferation of payments technology and a proliferation of payments standards.” Against that backdrop, there is a pressing need for banks to adopt payments platforms that are malleable enough to embrace new payment types and flows between parties.

To that end, ACI has introduced its UP Retail Payments solution, which it bills as having the flexibility to integrate with customers currently using BASE24, which is the electronic retail payment switch commonly utilized by banks, payment processors and retailers. In addition, the UP Retail Payments solution can be used to migrate to the BASE24-eps payments platform, which allows for transactions across multiple channels. That’s key for transactions that are going to run across channels.

Barnes noted that the UP Retail Payments offering has the ability to sit on top of banks’ existing, legacy systems and, as such, can work with, and serve as a bridge between, systems in place and the eventual embrace of standards yet to be mandated. By bringing payments technology to bear on the BASE24-eps migration, said Barnes, firms can benefit from cloud-based hardware and 100 percent uptime for transactions.

Because the new ACI technology is designed to facilitate universal payments, that sweeping framework can embrace cross-border transactions and B2B payments, too, said Barnes. “The value proposition here,” said the executive, “is that [payments professionals] can act quickly to set up clearing house connections” that can be used for those designations “and can be done without asking [companies] to rip out their existing switch.” New types of transactions can be layered upon old ones, said Barnes.

For cross-border payments, Barnes said that retail and commercial payments are converging to use the same technology. The initiatives that will speed this convergence along, Barnes said, include ISO 20022, which is the messaging scheme that stretches across several types of payments, purchases using cards and foreign exchanges. As mobile banking, self-service banking and consumer transactions over mobile conduits continue to gain traction, convergence across channels becomes more important. Barnes said that some countries, such as Australia, have been placing relatively heavier emphasis on B2B transactions than might be seen elsewhere.

It is a common concern when adopting new technology that payments professionals look for reassurance on security matters. Barnes told PYMNTS that the $200 million deal made late last year to buy PAY.ON, the gateway solutions company, was specifically geared toward eCommerce and risk control, with CNP fraud-fighting capability.