SIA (Società Interbancaria per l'Automazione), the Italian provider of IT solutions and services for the banking and financial community, has launched SIA-ACH (Automated Clearing House), a new scalable and customisable system for processing retail payments.
SIA developed and currently manages the Bank of Italy's ACH and EBA-STEP2, the pan-European Clearing House for retail payments in Euros, commissioned by the Euro Banking Association. With SIA-ACH SIA adds to its payment systems offer a highly innovative proprietary platform, designed to enhance Central Banks' and ACH associations' return over investments and guarantee efficiency and security, reducing risks. Thus SIA offers both a real innovative technological solution and a support as a business integrator taking advantage of over 20 years of experience on payment systems.
SIA-ACH introduces maximum flexibility thanks to its built-in modular configuration. The modular structure allows SIA-ACH to be deployed in a reduced and cost-effective environment, or alternatively in an extended and high performance computing environment. Indeed, unlike traditional ACH services, a customised ACH solution can be promptly and easily shaped: a set of additional modules, each one focusing on a major functionality, is available to be quickly linked to the basic platform and to the needs of the Central Bank. The platform can be easily extended to existing environments thanks to its user-configurable system and responds to the highest international security standards (BS 7799 and ISO 9001/Vision 2000 certifications).
SIA-ACH offers a complete range of support services. Customers can, therefore, take advantage of SIA's help on the basis of their needs and on an accurate understanding of their objectives, covering them through all steps of implementation: programme management, assessment, consulting, customisation, integration, deployment, training of resources, support and documentation.
By adopting SIA-ACH, Central Banks and ACH associations become providers of a real-time service, through a usable architecture which allows a significant and progressive cost and time reduction.
Participants (bank and authorised financial institutions), on their turn, will focus their attention to managing payment flows, with the introduction of real-time liquidity monitoring, the integration of back-office systems and the introduction of new payment products to customers.
"SIA-ACH is part of the strategy with which SIA looks at completing his offer in the payment systems sector," says Renzo Vanetti, SIA's Chief Executive Officer. "The platform is, indeed, the key component of a complete, integrated financial system infrastructure developed to meet the fundamental needs of Central Banks and clearing houses of emerging countries. On the one hand, to address new infrastructure challenges, as the evolution of interbanking payments, new capital market requirements and the internationalisation of payment systems. On the other, to enhance the effectiveness of the whole national banking system."
SIA-ACH is part of a complete financial system infrastructure for payment systems, clearing and trading called SIA Financial System, which includes also a Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS), an innovative trading platform (Tradeimpact) and a Central Securities Depository and Registry (Clearimpact).