ACI Worldwide Brings Real Time Payments to Outdated System

ACI Worldwide powers the payment processing and banking of more than 5,000 financial institutions, retailers, billers and processors from around the world, and its software handles more than $13 trillion dollars in payments and securities for more than 250 of the leading global retailers as well as 21 of the top 25 largest banks in the world. If you’ve made or received a payment electronically over the last 40 years, ACI was most likely involved.

Last week, ACI Worldwide unveiled its latest consumer payment solution, UP BASE24-eps. And with it, ACI is looking to make payments a lot faster and a lot cheaper.

Businesses that use ACI’s UP BASE24-eps system will be able to bypass the ACH system, allowing money to be transferred in real time. Where these payments could normally take up to 3 days to completely transfer over on the current system, utilizing this new platform will remove the risk and hassles associated with the current payment limbo transactions seem to have to pass through now.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about ACI’s new platform is just how long it’s taken to happen. At the company’s recent event held simultaneously in New York and London, Forbes magazine’s editor-in-chief spoke about the issue stating, “It’s amazing in this day and age, just how much antiquated technology is out there, standing in the way of getting a transaction done.”

As far as to just why it’s taken this long, ACI Worldwide’s CEO Phil Heasley blamed it on fragmentation within the industry, and how this created a very convoluted and roundabout way of performing a transaction saying “Every type of [payment system] is being developed separately, so people have to aggregate them rather than integrate them.”

ACI Worldwide’s UP BASE24-eps payment platform looks to be an all-in-one solution for payment transactions, making sending and accepting payments a much more painless process for everyone involved. Outside of allowing real time payments, the system will also allow both card and cardless payments to be performed on the same infrastructure, facilitate mobile and person-to-person payments, consolidate legacy systems, and a long list of other services.

By removing and consolidating many of the technologies that have held the industry back, companies can, as Heasley put it, “take 40 years of compromise” out of their business models.

The Industry has been hurting for a solution like this for a while now, and ACI is providing it in a very large-scale way. It may be over a decade late, but it looks like the payment industry has finally entered the 21^st century.