Payments expert ACI Worldwide announced it now offers intelligent payments routing for Swift ledger transactions. The capabilities are available using ACI Connetic, the company’s cloud-native payments hub.
Swift’s blockchain-based ledger was announced last year to help banks move tokenized deposits across borders beyond traditional operating hours. While the 17 banks involved stand to benefit from the infrastructure, many have not fit tokenized deposit payments into their day-to-day operations.
Using ACI Connetic, banks will be able to process tokenized deposit payments, as well as traditional payment types, into the same payments environment banks already use to route, monitor, control and reconcile payments at scale. Because banks can use the same operational controls, workflows, and infrastructure for tokenized payments as they do with traditional payments, it eliminates the need for separate digital-asset payment operations.
“Digital assets should extend a bank’s payment capabilities, not force it to build a second payment operation,” said ACI Worldwide SVP, Head of Account-to-Account Payments, Craig Ramsey. “Banks need a practical way to operationalize tokenized deposits at scale using the people, controls and processes they already trust. With ACI Connetic, payments orchestrated through Swift’s ledger can be managed alongside other payment flows within a common operational framework.”
Swift’s ledger may provide the infrastructure to move tokenized value across borders, but banks still need a way to incorporate those transactions into their existing payment operations. By routing Swift ledger transactions alongside traditional payments, ACI Connetic could lower one of the barriers to adoption by allowing banks to experiment with and scale tokenized deposits without building a parallel payments stack. As tokenized deposits move from pilots toward production, that ability to integrate new rails into existing infrastructure will become increasingly important.
ACI Worldwide’s ACI Connetic works by unifying payment types, payment rails, and controls in a single platform that uses bank- and customer-defined rules to automatically select the best clearing and settlement path. This automatic routing gives banks flexibility while maintaining consistent controls and visibility and allowing for scale without relying on a separate operation.
Founded in 1975, ACI Worldwide’s solutions power intelligent payments orchestration in real time to allow banks, billers, and merchants to modernize their payment infrastructure. The company combines a global footprint with local expertise to help its clients manage evolving payment methods and infrastructure. ACI Worldwide, which presented at our developer’s conference at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker ACIW.