The Dovetail Faster Payments Solution supports both Member and Agency Banks and delivers the common payment processing and communications functions that will enable them to meet the demands of the new payment scheme in the required timescales. Concurrently, Alaric’s Authentic Faster Payments Gateway provides all the functionality required within an ISO 8583 Gateway to manage communication between the bank and the Faster Payments Central Infrastructure operated by Link and Voca. The combination of these best of breed Java-based solutions delivers a functionally rich operating environment for a bank, enabling easy integration of existing payment systems with new delivery channels.

APACS recently announced that a new Faster Payments clearing and settlement service will be introduced in the UK to facilitate near real-time clearing of internet and telephone banking payments and standing orders for UK account customers. The implementation timescales are ambitious, as the Faster Payments Service is scheduled to go live in November 2007. UK banks, which are Member or Agency Banks, must implement systems to ensure that they (and their customers) are capable of testing against the Faster Payments Service Central Infrastructure early in 2007.

The Faster Payments Service requires Member Banks to clear and settle transactions for bank customers in a near real-time. It places demands on a bank’s existing liquidity management, anti-money laundering and accounting capabilities, as it moves UK clearing and settlement closer to near real-time processing and more payments move from the current three-day cycle. The Dovetail Faster Payments Solution enables banks to manage the business flows between their internal systems and the Faster Payments Central Infrastructure and addresses the requirement for high-volume performance for Single Immediate Payments, Diarised Payments and Standing Orders.

"For banks who harness time-to-market advantages to implement these changes, we believe Faster Payments offers a significant opportunity to deliver increased revenue from new, differentiated payment products for key customer segments – including the corporate market – and gain maximum benefit from the first step to near real-time clearing in the UK," commented Steve Lomax, Head of Marketing at Alaric.

"Alaric is an industry leader in the ISO 8583 domain and has an established, proven, high performance payments gateway. We are delighted with the success of our collaboration to develop and prove an integrated working Faster Payments system that can already process outward SIP’s", commented Kevin MacEntee-Creighton, Managing Director, Dovetail Systems. "Our teams are now working together to extend the payment and message types processed and to demonstrate the capabilities of the combined solution to the Member and Agency Banks preparing for Faster Payments."