The new suite features three significant elements: Kabira Financial Payment Switch, Kabira Financial Payment Authorization, and Kabira Financial Payment Hub. The first two products are available now and Kabira Financial Payment Hub availability is scheduled for Q3, 2007. This new family of software products provides the payments industry - including large merchants, acquirers, merchant service providers, payment processors, card associations, issuers, and other payment solution providers - configurable transaction acquiring, switching, and real-time processing of electronic payments.

The next-generation architecture puts Kabira on the frontier of providing new solutions at a cost comparable to lower-priced J2EE systems, yet matches mainframe speed and reliability, and surpasses them all with extensibility and flexibility. Combining a fully memory-resident runtime environment, event-driven architecture, and design for operation on low-cost commodity hardware, Kabira solutions offer the best scalability in the industry and the lowest TCO.

Kabira Financial Payment Switch (KFPS) is designed to provide the functionality needed to support real-time transaction acquiring and switching, including message normalization, routing, journal entry, and risk management. At its core is an innovative payment transaction delivery platform that connects disparate payment systems and networks. Leveraging the new platform, KFPS provides a flexible framework that enables enterprises to adapt quickly to changes in their business - such as bringing in a new channel or changing routing paths - significantly reducing time-to-market and maintenance costs.

The new Kabira solution is already in use in mission critical environments. Japan's NTT Data's payment transaction business unit, CAFIS, is using KFPS for its new payment infrastructure to meet the growing and changing needs of the card processing market. NTT Data has since expanded its use of KFPS to provide cross-border merchant customers with low-cost access to the proprietary CAFIS card processing system - an approach that did not require the company to rip and replace its core system.

"Kabira Financial Payment Switch is a very flexible and extensible platform that allows CAFIS to make rapid changes to our existing systems and to extend functionality to meet our specific needs and business conditions and strategies change," said Masanori Kurihara, Deputy Manager of the Card Payment Group, NTT Data CAFIS' Cards and Payment Transaction Business Unit. "We selected Kabira because it provides CAFIS the best of both worlds, security with a high level of reliability and lower cost to help achieve higher profit margins."

Kabira Financial Payment Authorization (KFPA) is designed to allow payment processors and acquiring institutions to deliver real-time authorization services on a modern architecture that is scalable, highly reliable, and features sub-second response time. Today, these organizations run their transaction authorization service on expensive and inflexible mainframe-based systems. Transaction volumes are soaring and market demands for newer services require constant introduction of new services and payment channels. KFPA provides a highly scalable yet cost-effective transaction authorization solution that lets financial payment service providers achieve economies of scale and drive down transaction costs by keeping processing within their own networks, rather than outsource processing of new payment types to third parties. They can deliver new services rapidly within KFPA's SOA-compliant, business process modeling (BPM) environment. Very low latency allows enterprises to include complex fraud detection logic in the path of transactions in real-time with no impact on service level agreements.

Kabira Financial Payment Hub, (KFPH) which is scheduled to ship in Q3, 2007, is designed to enable businesses to deploy a flexible payment infrastructure which leverages shared services across payment types while orchestrating payment-specific services from existing systems. KFPH will feature logic reusability - a radical departure from the rigidly designed, "silo-based" infrastructures in use today - to facilitate enterprise-wide use of shared logic and services. The Kabira Payment Hub is designed to reduce costs and risk by enforcing consistent policies, such as fraud mitigation, across all payment types and by eliminating redundant services currently delivered and maintained within individual payment silos.