These business solutions will bring together Pegasystems' SmartBPM(TM) product with IBM Business Consulting Services, WebSphere middleware and IBM's Information FrameWork business models for banking (IFW), to provide fast 'starter-templates' that banks can use out-of-the box to rapidly drive top-line growth and bottom-line savings in wholesale bank account opening.

The goal of these solution frameworks is to provide wholesale banks with greater visibility into business processes, ensuring better control of activity and the ability to streamline these processes for better use of resources. Banks needing to increase close-rates, achieve a faster time to revenue, develop closer interdepartmental collaboration and automate manual tasks such as prequalification, data collection and closing and activation processes will use the application to drive these processes while ensuring compliance and reducing risk.

Pegasystems and IBM's Business Consulting Services work closely together in the market to define and deliver customized solutions to customers based on Pegasystems' platform and IBM's industry expertise.

"IBM and Pegasystems are combining strengths in process integration to offer rapid time to value delivered by Component Based and Service Oriented Architectures", said John Mesberg, vice president Industry Solutions, FSS. "In combination with IBM BCS subject matter expertise, IBM IFW assets for Banking, and IBM SOA Foundation, Pegasystems delivers powerful and highly flexible business solutions to our mutual wholesale banking customers."

Tom Congoran, vice president of business development, Pegasystems, added "This is an important milestone in our relationship with IBM and an ideal means of providing our wholesale banking customers with a solution to deliver business benefits very quickly. Recent tests with IBM have also shown that our combined solutions can handle over 31,500 simultaneous users processing over 3 million unique cases in a single workday, demonstrating productivity, agility and unparalleled performance."

Separately, Pegasystems Inc. (Nasdaq: PEGA) announced today that its SmartBPM(TM) Solution, Smart Investigate, has been awarded the SWIFTNet Ready Exceptions and Investigations 2005 label. As a result, Pegasystems products that offer SWIFTNet E&I support will now carry the "SWIFTNet Ready" label. These products enable substantial improvements in straight-through processing (STP) for investigation handling.

While SWIFT estimates that only 5% of investigations are currently processed straight-through, they recently conducted a study which indicated up to 60% could be processed without manual intervention through the use of SWIFT-certified solutions, such as Pegasystems' Smart Investigate for Payments and SWIFTNet Exceptions and Investigations. The impact of this dramatic increase in STP could be an annual benefit of up to EUR 148 million industry-wide, according to SWIFT.

Lazaro Campos, Head of Banking Industry Division, SWIFT, said "The SWIFT certification is an important accomplishment, and we are pleased to certify Pegasystems as compliant with the new SWIFTNet Exceptions and Investigations message and business process standards. We believe new SWIFTNet-compliant solutions will deliver real value to the global banking community by driving STP to levels previously unattainable."

Pegasystems was selected as one of only four global vendors to demonstrate the new SWIFTNet E&I solution at this year's Sibos exhibition in Copenhagen. "We have years of experience providing Tier 1 banks and others unparalleled opportunities to add value to their investigations and other systems. We are delighted to receive this recognition," commented David Wells, Pegasystems Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA.