ACI's Open Account Manager, designed and built from the ground up on the TSU standards, is fully compliant with TSU Release 2, which went into live production as of March 1, 2009. Service providers need to ensure that their systems are TSU 2009 certified or they will not be able to make use of the TSU solution.

Release 2 of the Trade Services Utility (TSU) allows banks to extend the existing TSU message sets to include support for the Bank Payment Obligation, the "notice of intent to pay", insurance, certificates and special requests along with the important addition of secondary banks, such as submitting banks and obligor banks. Now trade banks worldwide can offer new Open Account services based on these additional Release 2 message types to support a variety of financial supply chain activities to their corporate trade clients that meet today's industry challenges.

ACI Open Account Manager enables the banks to send, receive and reconcile their clients' purchase orders and invoices along with other trade documentation. In addition, banks are able to pick up the trade data directly from their clients, and translate this data to TSU message types for sending. Then when TSU information is received back by the bank, Open Account Manager will convert those TSU messages back into the format required by the bank's client.

"SWIFT is committed to staying up to date with the needs of financial institutions around the world, so we regularly update our standards to deliver the solutions that the industry needs. It is essential that vendors invest in their solutions to meet these changes and, once again, ACI has done that with Open Account Manager," said Jackie Keogh, head of global transaction banking and supply chain solutions at SWIFT. "SWIFTReady TSU accreditation proves to banks that ACI's end-to-end solution enables them to interact efficiently with the TSU."

Louis Blatt, chief product officer at ACI Worldwide, said "Customers around thee world rely on solutions from ACI to meet the evolving standards of the industry, and ensure they can run their business effectively. Obtaining the SWIFTReady TSU certification again this year underscores our commitment to delivering state-of-the-art products and technologies that have the agility to meet changing business and operational demands."

Open Account Manager is a comprehensive trade solution that offers open account services, including online purchase order (PO) issuance, invoice matching, and automatic generation of invoices and packing lists. It enables financial institutions to align with both their customers and the strategic partners of their customers, to integrate services across the trade value chain. This integration creates more symbiotic relationships and increases business opportunities with all aspects of the open account trade process.