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ACI Worldwide: Empowering Organizations with Modern Enterprise Payments Capabilities

CIO VendorPhilip G. Heasley, President & CEO
To remain at the centre ofconsumers’ financial lives, financial institutions must prioritize the consumers experience at the centre of the payment transaction. Addressing this requirement through mobile devices, companies have been quick to offer a various types of ‘payment transaction’ for their customers. While such digital transactions are increasingly gaining prominence, CIOs observe that today’s financial data is highly vulnerable to fraudsters. “If money takes three to four stops in one transaction it has three to four diff ways to be stolen, but if it goes point to point, we can eliminate the places it can be stolen,” explains Philip G. Heasley, President and Chief Executive Officer,ACI Worldwide. Targeting this void in payment technology landscape, “ACI Worldwide empowers organizations with end-to-end enterprise payment capabilities accelerating time to market, reducing risk, growing revenues, and controlling costs,” states Heasley.

Through an integrated suite of software products and hosted services, ACI delivers a broad range of financial software solutions for payments processing, card and merchant management on a secured and resilient platform for critical payments processing. Creating a responsive and flexible environment, the Universal Payments (UP) Framework offered by ACI Worldwide helps banks and financial institutions in building new interfaces, orchestrate workflows and define new payment types. UP Framework is a robust set of enterprise business services based on a flexible technology foundation. Delivering services in a consistent, scalable way across payment types, channels, networks and currencies the platform spans both wholesale and retail capabilities enabling a true single hub approach. It provides an infrastructure that allows agility to effectively respond to new business initiatives regulation, technology advancements or a new threat.


ACI Worldwide empowers organizations with end-to-end enterprise payment capabilities


It offers the ability to renovate payments applications while still using the best of an organization's current infrastructure.

While upgrading to a new eCommerce system to accept online tuition and housing payments, American University faced the challenge of an existing electronic payments system that often went down for hours at a time. While doing so, the university also wanted to increase compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) regulations to ensure data security as the students and parents submitted electronic payments. The ACI UP Bill Payment solutions leveraged its cost efficient payments platform with security that powers more than 50 electronic payment systems across the American University campus. The solution also streamlines bill payment processing while providing a single view of all payments from all channels in an environment featuring full PCIDSS compliance and privacy practices. American University can now effectively engage with students and parents offering reliable and convenient payment systems.

ACI Wordwide, which once developed communication software for the ATMs, now serves 18 of the top 20 global banks. The company today powers electronic payments and banking for more than 5,000 financial institutions, retailers, billers and processors around the world. Achieving its global presence through strategic partnership on grounds of alliance, technology, channel, and type of industry, the company has also had major acquisitions the most recent one being the acquisition of German based PayOn, a provider of hosted payment gateway services. With over 40 years of expertise in the payment industry, Heasley states that the company envisions innovating in “real-time, any-to-any payment solution.”