VocaLink, one of Europe's largest payment transaction processors, adopts the Distra Switch platform...
VocaLink, one of Europe’s largest payment transaction processors, adopts the Distra Switch platform to provide a highly reliable, low risk gateway through which the bank’s existing payments infrastructure can connect to the UK’s “Faster Payments Service”.
Commencing with the Cruickshank Report, published in March 2000, and subsequent Office of Fair Trading inquiries, the UK banks were under growing consumer pressure to voluntarily improve the existing three day clearing and settlement cycle. In due course the UK banks’ governing body APACS, working with representatives from each of the banks, defined and agreed the “Faster Payments Service”.
The service improves the speed of low value consumer and corporate transactions by reducing the time from initiating the transaction to receipt of funds to two hours or less. The authorities further mandated an aggressive compliance timeline with the system required to go live in November 2007.
Initially thirteen of the UK's banks signed up for online access of the service with further expansion planned once the service is in production.
VocaLink recognised that while most of the UK's banks already had some capability to support on-line transaction processing for card transactions, these were largely based on cumbersome and legacy technologies. Thus the impact of changing or extending these systems to meet the Faster Payments requirements involved significant risk to “business as usual”, and would incur the usual time and cost penalties associated with modifying older solutions, not to mention the chance of not meeting scheme implementation deadlines.
Adopting Distra’s next generation switch technology, which combines the traditional enterprise levels of reliability and availability with contemporary, open, standards based integration capability, has allowed VocaLink to offer the banks joining the UK's 'Faster Payments Service', an alternative low risk, low cost, easy to implement option by leveraging Distra's comprehensive component and framework based architecture to meet the authorities' deadline.
Speed to market with a new payments product that offered VocaLink’s target clients a low risk, low impact solution that could be integrated easily and quickly with existing back-end systems to meet aggressive industry timelines.
VocaLink's Faster Payments gateway was delivered on time and ready to meet the regulators timetable for connectivity testing. All Voca's bank clients utilising the gateway passed connectivity on the first attempt and are well placed to meet the go-live date in November 2007.