Dovetail Systems and Alaric showcase UK Faster Payments Solution

London, England – Dovetail Systems, a leading global payment systems provider and Alaric, a leading supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry, today announced the availability of an integrated UK Faster Payments showcase to demonstrate to UK banks.

The Dovetail Faster Payments Solution supports both Member and Agency Banks and delivers the common payment processing and communications functions that will enable them to meet the demands of the new payment scheme in the required timescales. Concurrently, Alaric’s Authentic Faster Payments Gateway provides all the functionality required within an ISO 8583 Gateway to manage communication between the bank and the Faster Payments Central Infrastructure operated by Link and Voca. The combination of these best of breed Java-based solutions delivers a functionally rich operating environment for a bank, enabling easy integration of existing payment systems with new delivery channels.

APACS recently announced that a new Faster Payments clearing and settlement service will be introduced in the UK to facilitate near real-time clearing of internet and telephone banking payments and standing orders for UK account customers. The implementation timescales are ambitious, as the Faster Payments Service is scheduled to go live in November 2007. UK banks, which are Member or Agency Banks, must implement systems to ensure that they (and their customers) are capable of testing against the Faster Payments Service Central Infrastructure early in 2007.

The Faster Payments Service requires Member Banks to clear and settle transactions for bank customers in a near real-time. It places demands on a bank’s existing liquidity management, anti-money laundering and accounting capabilities, as it moves UK clearing and settlement closer to near real-time processing and more payments move from the current three-day cycle. The Dovetail Faster Payments Solution enables banks to manage the business flows between their internal systems and the Faster Payments Central Infrastructure and addresses the requirement for high-volume performance for Single Immediate Payments, Diarised Payments and Standing Orders.

“For banks who harness time-to-market advantages to implement these changes, we believe Faster Payments offers a significant opportunity to deliver increased revenue from new, differentiated payment products for key customer segments – including the corporate market – and gain maximum benefit from the first step to near real-time clearing in the UK,” commented Steve Lomax, Head of Marketing at Alaric.

”Alaric is an industry leader in the ISO 8583 domain and has an established, proven, high performance payments gateway. We are delighted with the success of our collaboration to develop and prove an integrated working Faster Payments system that can already process outward SIP’s,” commented Kevin MacEntee-Creighton, Managing Director, Dovetail Systems. “Our teams are now working together to extend the payment and message types processed and to demonstrate the capabilities of the combined solution to the Member and Agency Banks preparing for Faster Payments.”





About Dovetail

Dovetail Systems provides business transaction processing platform technology, high-value and bulk, multi-bank, multi-currency payments solutions, and trade-matching securities settlement solutions to the global financial services industry. The Java-based open standards architecture is secure, scalable, flexible, and dependable technology that easily adapts to the constantly evolving marketplace and regulatory landscape. Dovetail was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Fairfield, New Jersey with offices in Cork City, Ireland and London, UK. Applications include Q5, a transaction processing platform; Envoy, a wholesale banking payments solution; Liquidity Manager; Party Search Engine; PayAssure, an ACH/bulk payment solution and CorpPay, a corporate-to-bank payment solution.

For further information, please visit us at www.dovetailsystems.com

About Alaric

Headquartered in London, Alaric is a leading supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry. Alaric offers java based solutions for card payments authorization and switching, fraud detection and prevention, risk management and payment systems integration. Alaric’s customers include First Data International, Swisscard, Cornèr Banca and Yorkshire Building Society. Alaric's product set was launched in 2001. Being written in Java, the solutions are fully portable while scalable to meet the needs of the smallest through the largest institution. Alaric's success is a result of its dedicated focus on the payments industry together with a clear recognition of the need to collaborate with partners.

For further information, please visit us at www.alaricinternational.com