The upgraded product, which is available to new and existing Authentic customers, incorporates many new features and enhancements to extend the benefits that Authentic can bring to its users, including:

• Support for additional databases: IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL
• New settlement functionality, delivering another component in the strategy to strengthen the card and merchant management functionality in Authentic
• Extended authorisation functions incorporating recent customer requests
• New capability in ATM device support such as cash and cheque deposit functions
• Extended 'off the shelf' card scheme and network message configuration, including Diners Club
• Microsoft Active Directory support allowing integration with corporate security services

Authentic is a modern, ultra high-performance EFT authorisation and routing system managing transactions from all channels across the enterprise from ATM and POS to ecommerce and mobile. Authentic includes card management functionality, making it an ideal solution for companies of all sizes. It is currently used by customers around the world, including some of the world's largest processors and a global card scheme. It is proven to be highly scalable and robust, achieving in excess of ten thousand transactions per second in recent performance tests.

Unlike conventional payments processing software, Authentic enables change. It is designed to deliver unrivalled flexibility, with message mapping, processing workflow and business logic all user configurable. Authentic enables clients to have total strategic control of their system, and to perform or maintain their own customisations without being locked-in to long term contracts with Alaric.

"With the latest release of Authentic, we have listened to our customers and prospects and delivered the changes that we know will make their lives easier every day," said Mike Alford, CEO at Alaric. "We know that many want to have a choice of database, so we have delivered support for DB2 and SQL. Our customers have been asking for a settlement solution, Authentic now offers that. In addition, the 250 other enhancements and updates will all make the system even easier, faster, more efficient, more scalable, and more robust than ever before."

"For Alaric, product releases are about extending the core functionality and making available the best customer configured items from recent projects. With Authentic's strong configurability and extensibility, customers have always been able to quickly deliver new services and capability themselves; delivering more 'off the shelf' configurations makes it even easier for them."

All existing customers of Authentic will receive the new version at no additional license cost, should they wish to move - however no older versions of Authentic have ever been 'sunsetted' so customers can remain on older systems until they feel the time is right to upgrade.