The new offering marks the availability of real-time convergence and consolidation of payment types for financial and non-financial institutions. It enables different payment and message types to be run across a single platform and allows organisations to quickly address cost, regulatory and competitive challenges, with minimal risk and maximum reliability.

"Most banks or processors currently use multiple systems to process multiple types of payments, so they are faced with poor cost efficiency, limited flexibility to innovate and very little visibility with regard to the performance of their payment operations" says Christophe Uzureau, Research Director, Gartner. "It is critical in today's market that financial institutions transform their operations and leverage payments more strategically, or risk being left behind by competitors and their customers"

Based on Distra's smart, modern switching platform, already proven in multiple tier one institutions, the Distra Universal Switch is suitable for both the retail electronic funds transfer (EFT) market and the wholesale banking environment. Supporting enterprise level, real-time performance and availability requirements, it also enables conversion between real-time and batch payments processing models.

"The sun is setting on payment systems that are inflexible, non-transparent and require different switches for different payment types," says Mike Aston, CEO, Distra. "Today's market demands convergence and consolidation of payments systems to quickly and cost effectively respond to industry and regulatory changes as and when required. By enabling organisations to streamline payment operations within a single switch, they can take advantage of a more agile environment, delivering greater efficiencies and escaping the barriers traditionally associated with payment operations."

Financial institutions today need to be able to quickly respond to requests, and there is a need to manage growth - organic, acquired or geographic - as well as volumes and volatility. The Distra Universal Switch allows organisations to quickly adapt to change, and adopt new business models as and when required through the flexibility provided by a right here right now environment.

Architected specifically to enable payments transformation, the Distra Universal Switch includes advanced payment switching applications capable of performing a variety of payment processing rules including multi-leg transactions, and supporting multiple payment channel types such as ISO 8583, ISO 20022 and batch. It runs on an intelligent fault tolerant platform proven in a tier one environment, supports Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Payment Services Directive (PSD) compliance, and enables real-time transaction metrics and performance reporting.