In a joint programme, undertaken in co-operation with Intel, OCS recorded throughput of 11,109 business transactions per second with an average response time of 63ms.

The Open Card System is a latest-generation system for banks and processors, designed to meet the needs of card issuers and acquirers globally and to position financial institutions for the next wave of mobile payment schemes. Based on Java and SOA architectural principles, OCS provides a low-cost and ultra-reliable path forward for card payment processors looking to refresh their technology and take advantage of the move towards payment services hubs. With full PA-DSS certification, OCS enables financial institutions to reduce their costs and modernise their current infrastructure in a controlled and secure manner and is being used by a number of financial institutions around the world today.

The benchmark was conducted at Intel's fasterLAB in Swindon, UK. OCS was configured to accept a randomly selected blend of device and switch-acquired transactions and to authorize them against a positive database consisting of 20,000,000 cards and accounts. The OCS environment consisted of nine dual Intel® Xeon® X5670-based application server nodes, each with six cores running at 2.93 GHz. OCS also utilized Oracle Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.2 on a dual Intel Xeon X5690-based system with 6 cores running at 3.46 GHz. To ensure the highest database availability, Oracle was configured with Real Application Clusters. To further demonstrate the power of this configuration, various failover tests involving loss of hardware resources were conducted with no loss of data and no effect on overall transaction processing.

Gordon Hughes, Alliance Director Financial Services, Intel comments: "The benchmark clearly demonstrates that Intel and Clear2Pay can together successfully handle very high transaction volumes in a reliable manner. The combination of Clear2Pay's OCS application combined withh Intel's industry-leading hardware provides a compelling proposition to banks looking to simplify their payments processing and reduce costs".

"Given the high TPS results of the benchmark, we were especially pleased with the performance of Oracle's database technology which underpins Clear2Pay's OCS card processing application. We are confident that the combination of Oracle and Clear2Pay now delivers the power, reliability and performance levels that large card processors demand", states Warren Gardiner, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Clear2Pay.

"The tests conclusively demonstrate the ability of OCS to scale in order to meet the performance and availability global financial institutions demand. As such it is a future proof solution for banks wishing to progressively modernise their cards payments infrastructure. We are confident that we can help meet the needs of even the largest processors looking to reduce costs and gain efficiencies", adds Alain Vansnick, VP Cards at Clear2Pay.