These new capabilities build on Pegasystems' recently announced horizontal application, Pega Quality & Exception Manager, to deliver a comprehensive suite for managing and resolving payment exceptions with greater automation, ease and flexibility. The applications, built on Pegasystems' fourth-generation, Java- and XML-based BPM platform, provide management of the wide range of exceptions on a single backbone, enabling financial services firms to improve coordination and control across disparate business areas, geographies and operational silos.

Pegasystems provides a genuinely differentiated approach to solving complex process management challenges, thanks to its combination of out-of-the-box rule sets, extensive integration abilities, expertise in unifying front-to-back-office processes, platform flexibility ranging from mainframe to UNIX to Linux and, above all, the ability to provide business users with the agility to help change and specialise their processes quickly and easily. The new applications leverage the company's extensive expertise with many of the world's largest financial institutions, including eight of the top 15 U.S. card issuers, nine of the top 12 U.S. banks, such as Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and all 12 U.S. Federal Reserve Banks.

Smart Dispute and Smart Adjust, as well as Pega Quality & Exception Manager, leverage the power of Pegasystems' new Process CommanderTM Version 4 BPM platform. With integrated business rules and process management, V4 is designed to handle decision-intensive processes, manage processes across multiple departments and empower business users to effect rapid change of both rules and processes. The applications support global financial institutions with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities, sophisticated reporting and activity monitoring for improved control, and the flexibility to continuously adapt to the company's operations.

"A rules-based business process management infrastructure is the link that turns back-end systems into efficiency and cost-cutting gains everywhere in the enterprise," said Robert Hunt, senior analyst in the Retail & Commercial Banking practice of TowerGroup, a leading financial services research and consulting firm.

Packaged functionality for the enterprise
PegaCARD Smart Dispute helps credit and debit card companies minimise unnecessary write-offs, improve operational efficiency and reduce the cost of processing disputes. Smart Dispute includes association regulations for automated reason code handling to help save costs and improve resolution times. PegaPAYMENT Smart Adjust automates research and adjustments across multiple payment forms, through a combination of best-practice rules and processes for retail payment exceptions. Smart Adjust is image-enabled and "Check 21-ready," and can process check exceptions as well as other payment types to help bridge operational silos and create a single view of payment exceptions.

"Launching these packaged applications represents a big step forward in our strategy to deliver a suite of exceptions management applications to automate and help control the costly, complicated and often manually-intensive processes for payment exceptions and disputes. Capturing these business rules and processes as corporate assets will help enterprises see greater efficiency, control and responsiveness in their operations and customer service," said Henry Ancona, president and COO, Pegasystems.

Platforms and availability
PegaCARD Smart Dispute and PegaPAYMENT Smart Adjust on PegaRULES Process Commander V4 are available now through Pegasystems and its partners. They run on Windows, AIX, Linux, Solaris and mainframe platforms, and the IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases.