Banks and financial services providers are faced with the task of renovating older payments systems in response to competitive, regulatory and cost pressures. Many payments systems are siloed, running on multiple platforms from different vendors, each with unique data types, interfaces and message routing capabilities. In addition, many payments functions are deployed redundantly across multiple systems, creating unnecessary costs for banks as they maintain duplicate capabilities.

eFunds' Integrated Payments Platform -- comprised of CONNEX(TM), IST®/Switch, DataNavigator®, FraudManager and Enterprise View software applications -- and IBM technology including System z and p server platforms, and WebSphere, DB2 and Tivoli middleware, addresses these integration pain points by providing clients with an SOA framework that accesses, integrates and manages payments data wherever it resides. As a result, clients can now have a single view of payments data and share that information with other business applications across the enterprise to gain key insights into customer profitability and cross-selling opportunities.

"Our clients continue to look to eFunds to help lower the operational costs of their payments businesses, and transform transaction data into actionable insight they can use to grow the profitability of their most desirable customers," said Paul F. Walsh, chairman and chief executive officer for eFunds Corporation. "As an IBM Banking Industry Advantage Alliance Partner, we now have a global platform for delivering the benefits of our integrated payment processing and data management software solutions. Leveraging the program helps us better integrate our solutions on standard IBM platforms, middleware and storage systems, which in turn helps our global clients run their businesses more efficiently, more cost-effectively, and more profitably."


"Clients are facing difficult IT decisions as the changing payments landscape introduces new business opportunity and new regulatory demands on aging systems that fail to provide sufficient resiliency and flexibility," said June Felix, General Manager for IBM Banking Solutions. "We are pleased to join forces with eFunds to help clients accelerate the transformation of their payments business, drive more value from existing information assets and achieve their cost reduction and profit objectives with unmatched customer service and satisfaction."