ACI's BASE24-eps serves as the retail payment "engine'' for the MasterCard debit processing platform, leveraging BASE24-eps for ATM transaction acquiring, transaction clearing, and related electronic payment functions. In addition, MasterCard uses ACI Payments Manager to monitor all transaction activity, provide customer support features and manage payment settlement functions.

"The integration between ACI's BASE24-eps and the MasterCard IPS platform puts a powerful tool at the hands of banks to manage their accounts and to differentiate themselves in today's marketplace. The intricacies of the MasterCard IPS platform are facilitated by ACI's Payments Manager and put into a single connection for the end-user,'' said Adil Moussa, analyst with Aite Group, a leading independent research and advisory firm focused on business, technology and regulatory issues relating to the financial services industry.

BASE24-eps uses an open systems advanced architecture to provide intelligent transaction authentication, authorization and routing capabilities, as well as support for advanced ATM features from the leading vendors. This flexibility allows MasterCard to offer its financial institution customers customized and differentiated services. The solution is optimized to provide leading levels of scale, performance, reliability and security. ACI Payments Manager leverages payment and customer information to provide core transaction settlement and clearing capabilities, as well as insight into transaction patterns and trends.

"MasterCard sought the most advanced in-production payments solutions in the industry to help drive the payment innovations necessecessary to lead in this growing market,'' said George Spies, senior vice president, MasterCard Global Operations. "ACI's technology, expertise in the electronic payments business and its range of project and customer support capabilities play an important role in the success of our new platform. We're pleased to be working with ACI on this new and unique offering.''

"We have enjoyed a long and successful relationship with MasterCard over the years,'' said Ralph Dangelmaier, president of ACI Worldwide Americas. "We are excited that they have chosen our integrated solutions to help them meet their goals for market differentiation, time-to-market with new innovations, security, customer service levels, transaction performance and overall reliability. We look forward to working with MasterCard on this new initiative.''