CHIPS is a real-time, final payment system used by financial institutions around the world to clear U.S dollar payments totaling $1.3 trillion each day. It features multilateral netting with payment finality -- a patented process that maximizes the use of liquidity and whose benefits include a reduction of daylight overdraft charges for banks and the elimination of payment risk for the system. A single dollar in the CHIPS system turns over on average 500 times a day and will be reused many times by the netting process to clear and settle payments throughout the day.

"The efficient use of funds is just one reason BB&T is pleased to add CHIPS for processing wire payments," says Woody Tyner Senior Vice President of BB&T. "The new IntraNet interface also provides cost-effective access to the system and enables us to leverage CHIPS's online management tools and B-to-B features."

On Oct. 11, The Clearing House announced a special CHIPS's interface software licensing agreement with IntraNet, Inc., a leading provider of payment processing solutions. This interface dramatically lowers the cost of adding the CHIPS's module to a bank's funds transfer platform, thus eliminating a significant barrier for a bank to join CHIPS.

Hank Farrar, Senior Vice President of The Clearing House Payments Company responsible for CHIPS, says: "We are pleased that BB&T has added CHIPS to its payments processing capabilities. Using CHIPS, BB&T will have another option to manage large dollar volume payments in the U.S. in a completely secure, reliable and resilient system."

CHIPS is a premier wire transfer system with exceptional performance, operating at nearly 100% uptime year after year and a straight-through- processing rate of over 94%. CHIPS provides flexible, web-based management tools that allow financial institutions to control their use of CHIPS. These include such functions as intra-day research of payments and the management and prioritization of payments within the system that can be performed from anywhere with highly secure access.

With the growing trend to automate business processes, the movement to replace paper checks to electronic payments creates an opportunity in which CHIPS is well-positioned to help banks provide value-added services to their business customers. CHIPS is the only large-value payment system in the world that can support business-to-business payments in a straight-through processing environment and has the capability of carrying large amounts of remittance information with each payment. This feature enables CHIPS participants to offer their customers the unique ability to receive an integrated solution for moving payments and payments-related information. This simplifies the reconciliation process, along with providing immediate funds availability for large value payments.

"We invite other financial institutions to leverage the power of the world's premier, private-sector payments system, particularly since we've made it easier and more cost effective to use," says Mr. Farrar.