Cumberland Building Society is one of the first U.K. financial institutions to sign up for the Paym mobile payment service. The decision to invest in Alaric software to enable Paym is another example of the innovative building society's commitment to improve service and make every day easier for its customers.

The deployment is an extension to the existing relationship between NCR and Cumberland Building Society where Alaric's flexible and highly configurable Authentic and Fractals solutions are already used to process and protect payment transactions. This includes Cumberland Building Society's ATMs, internet banking and now mobile payment channels, as well as when Cumberland Building Society customers use the LINK ATM network or use their Visa debit cards.

"Improving our customer experience by adding value when they bank with us is at the heart of Cumberland Building Society's strategy," said Gary Richardson, |General Manager for IT at Cumberland Building Society. "One of the ways we achieve this is by responding to the way our customers want to bank by applying the latest technology. Smartphones are omni-present, so it was an easy decision to adopt the Paym service. Equally easy was the decision to extend our relationship with NCR and the Alaric team to ensure that our customers' Paym mobile payments are efficiently run and carefully protected by Authentic and Fractals."

Cumberland Building Society is one of the first nine bank and building society brands in the U.K. to offer the Paym service. It allows consumers to make secure, convenient payments to account holders of other participating banks or building societies using only the recipient's mobile phone number. No need to know, or remember, sort codes or account numbers.

"Responding to customer feedback and trends is fundamental to any good business. The financial industry is no different, but does lag other industries when it comes to adoption of mobile services and applications," said Rachel Nash, director of Financial Services at NCR U.K. "Cumberland Building Society has a track record as one of the U.K.'s most innovative financial institutions, so it was not surprising that it was one of the first to adopt Paym. The flexibility and configurability of the Authentic and Fractals software is such that it was able to easily extend to another banking channel, and help Cumberland run and protect this new service with minimal effort."

Authentic is a generalised payment platform most often used for payments applications, such as consumer payment services hubs, payment gateways and conventional card-related switching, authorisation, and device-driving applications. Authentic is an Open Development payment platform and handles any type of transaction. It can accept transactions from any device, source, or system, map these into different formats, authorise and authenticate them, and then route them to any destination. Authentic's design empowers clients to customise the system themselves, via GUI, without programming.

The Fractals intelligent fraud detection and prevention solution delivers value to all players in the transaction chain through a combination of self-learning models and user defined rules. This includes players, such as issuers, acquirers, processors, networks, PSPs, ISOs and merchants, for all product types, including credit, debit, prepaid or gift cards. Fractals is a multi-organisation, multi-hierarchy, multi-channel, multi-currency solution that is able to tackle any type of transactional fraud problem, including cross product, cross channel, enterprise fraud detection and prevention. Rare among fraud detection solutions, Fractals is PA-DSS certified.