This go-live is the culmination of Oman's national payment system, first launched in 2003, and gives the country a solid technological foundation for future e-payments initiatives.

Creating Oman's national switch has been a major project for the Central Bank of Oman, which involved consolidating two previously-independent switches, as well as ensuring all financial institutions in the country can communicate with and send and receive transactions from the central switch. The CBO used ACI Simulation Services for Enterprise Testing(TM) (ASSET) for the testing and certification of all the country's financial institutions to ensure they can interact with the central switch.

Now that the switch is live, it is expected to handle monthly volumes of approximately 5 million ATM and POS transactions, and it can handle transactions from EMV and non-EMV cards. The project will, for the first time, give Oman the ability to link directly with all the GCC Net switches, of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, instead of a single link through the member country switches. This means ATM transactions can be routed directly between GCC countries without going out to the wider card networks.

A senior officer from the CBO said, "For a project as critical to our national infrastructure as a new national switch, it was essential we worked with suppliers we could trust, who had proven, scalable and reliable technology that we knew could meet our current and future demands. A consortium comprising ACI, HP and IMTAC worked together, alongside the team at CBO and from member banks, to ensure this project was successful, and we could go live with confidence."

Ralph Dangelmaier, president, global markets and services at ACI Worldwide, said, "I am delighted that this project is live and Oman can start to benefit from this new technology. BASE24-eps gives the country a solid platform for future development of e-payment services, and features such as its multi-currency and multi-institution support are already being embraced by CBO. This project has been delivered successfully as a partnership between CBO, ACI, HP and IMTAC."