As part of a significant investment to improve transaction capabilities for its customers, Cuscal is migrating to an intelligent in-house payments model and has selected Alaric International, a leading supplier of advanced technology payments products and services. The full deployment of Alaric's services to Cuscal, which commenced in December 2010, comprises two world leading applications - the Authentic payments platform and Fractals, an advanced fraud detection engine.

Alaric's holistic approach to payments and fraud detection delivers a truly integrated solution, efficiently uniting payments processing with fraud detection to enable Cuscal's customers to compete more effectively with major banks in the fast moving Australian payments industry.

Authentic is being used to drive the Cuscal-owned ATMs within the RediATM national ATM network (one of Australia's largest ATM networks with over 3800 machines), issue and authorise a large portfolio of scheme and proprietary debit cards, provide back office integration to a large number of banking host systems, connect to the card schemes and into the rest of the Australian payments landscape.

Tightly integrated with Authentic is Fractals, Alaric's enterprise fraud detection solution, which is able to intelligently detect and block fraudulent transactions in flight, in real time. Fractals, with its ground-breaking statistical modelling and self-learning capability, offers a huge leap forward in detection capability when compared to dated neural network approaches.

Paul Griffin at Alaric International says: "Throughout the selection process Cuscal were focused on choosing a product set that was functionally rich but also delivered a far greater flexibility to deliver future change independently. Authentic is architected to be easily configured and changed, delivering Cuscal the agility that it needs to provide its members with a competitive edge. Authentic is a secure, robust and future-pproof platform providing the required flexibility and shared cost benefits. Working alongside Authentic is Fractals, our revolutionary fraud detection engine that will deliver security and peace of mind to the large number of cardholders that Cuscal services."

Cuscal selected Authentic because it offers a modern, open system architecture which can run on the latest commodity hardware and software platforms, without the need for expensive specialist programming. Craig Kennedy, Managing Director at Cuscal, comments: "The building of a new payments framework is a critical and exciting project for us. Alaric's Authentic and Fractals provide a robust foundation that will allow our customers to respond quickly and cost effectively to evolving market demand accommodating the emerging new delivery channels, such as Smartphone devices, or regulatory requirements. By collaborating with us as an independent and non-competitive third party, challenger financial institutions can access the efficiencies and cost benefits of a scale that are ordinarily only available to the major banks."