Combined Aconite and Alaric products will generate synergistic benefits for customers, particularly in relation to intelligent fraud management for EMV card transactions.

Aconite is a leading provider of software and consulting services primarily in the payments and transit markets, for managing business applications on chips in smart cards, tokens and mobile phones and Alaric International is a leading supplier of payments software and fraud prevention software. The partnership agreement covers all of the companies' products. The immediate focus is on the combination of Alaric's Fractals and Aconite Risk Status Translator to provide world-class fraud prevention, detection and management for EMV card transactions. With its unprecedented breadth of functionality for fighting fraud, this solution can greatly reduce fraud losses from EMV card transactions.

Patrick Regester, Aconite's EVP Sales & Marketing, said "We are very excited by this opportunity to deliver a unique set of capabilities to our customers from which they will derive significant benefits, including reduced fraud losses Other combinations of our products promise to deliver similar synergies. We are delighted to have gained such a capable, respected partner in Alaric."

"We are very pleased to be able to combine Aconite's products with ours" commented Alaric's CEO, Mike Alford. "The synergies between our products were obvious to us and, together with Aconite's established reputation for delivering smart card and EMV solutions and services, made partnering with Aconite an easy decision. We look forward to implementing the combined solutions for our customers and seeing the benefits realised."

Fractals is a class leading integrated, intelligent fraud detection and prevention framework for issuers and acquirers of debit, credit and other types of payment cards which can operate in real time, near-real time and batch detection modes.

Aconite Risk Status Translator helps issuers to fully exploit the risk management opportunities offered by EMV cards by empowering them to take control of the post issuance behaviour of the card's payment application. Acting as a link between fraud and risk management processes and the scripting engine, Risk Status Translator automatically converts the results of fraud and/or risk analysis into a post-issuance scripting action. This allows each cardholder to be individually managed with little or no manual intervention, enabling issuers to rapidly change the behaviour of the payment application. As a result, Risk Status Translator provides improved control, reduces credit and fraud risk, reduces operational costs and avoids manual errors.

Aconite products can also be combined with Alaric's Authentic product. Authentic is a modern EFT authorization and routing system for issuers and acquirers of credit, debit, charge and private label cards. Authentic, an SOA-oriented product, addresses the needs of banks, retailers and processors.