ACI's wholesale payment engine - MTS

The Money Transfer System (MTS) stemmed from ACI's acquisition of Intranet Worldwide, with the corporate brand killed off within a restructuring by ACI in November 2005. Prior to the arrival of MTS, ACI had a Tandem-based wholesale payments offering called MoneyNet, but MTS was positioned as the successor. Some MoneyNet customers moved across, others went
elsewhere (United Missouri Bank, for instance, moved from MoneyNet to Fundtech's PayPlus, with MTS rejected at the shortlist stage in 2001).

MTS is a multi-bank and multi-currency global payments processing and risk management system. It has interfaces to SwiftNet, plus multiple RTGS and low-value networks, so can span domestic and international payments processing. It also supports processing for SEPA Credit Transfers and Direct Debits. It started on DEC VAX under VMS but was ported to Unix. Today, it can use Oracle for record keeping and has a proprietary data store, built by Intranet, for transactions.  
The user base of MTS was largely in the US. By 2007, ACI could claim MTS was used by 15 of the top 25 US banks for highvalue and bulk payments processing and as a hub for payment switching. In Europe, the largest and broadest taker was Fortis Bank; American Express Bank also used the system to process its European payments out of Frankfurt. The SEPA support for MTS was unveiled in May 2006. The main work needed was around scalability and extending the ACH processing capabilities.
Linked to the first of these two aspects, ACI unveiled benchmark figures with IBM for the system, showing a throughput of 3.7 million payments per hour.

The improved throughput was based on concepts that had evolved over a number of years, said ACI CTO, Tony Smith, particularly at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). A pilot at the bank ran for nine months and, while it did not result in a commercial roll-out, a lot was learnt, he said. The need, particularly with SEPA, was felt to be a hybrid payments architecture which could handle both large, complex cross-border payments and simple mass payments. ACI had adopted a 'container'
concept. In the past, each payment was treated as a separate message and passed through the necessary complex workflows. For more simple payments, the idea is to group together similar ones, based on their key attributes, and process them together.

At the same time, based on input from banks in Europe, there was also still likely to be the need for the payments in these containers to go through different processing stages, such as account validation and fraud checking, so this had been incorporated into the design. The benchmark tests were intended to replicate this model, said Smith, with multiple host interactions. They were carried out in IBM's Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass, and used a 16 processor Unix server. While a
large box, it was not top of the line, he said.

There has been some chopping and changing of branding of MTS. For a while there was 'MTS-eps' (and before this Base24-wps – Wholesale Payments System) but these brands were dropped. Unlike Base24-eps, MTS is not a new system, as the way forward for the wholesale system has been a gradual rebuild.

MTS underpinned ACI's Swift bureau plans, with the company granted bureau status in October 2007. It started to offer services through its On-Demand SaaS model.  

In 2008, ACI signed an agreement with IBM to make MTS available on the IBM System z hardware (see below). The plan for MTS was still being worked out at the time of the announcement but the fact that it runs on the IBM System p and that IBM's AIX Unix can now run on a partition on the System z means this has become the mainframe route for MTS. Overall, the strategy for MTS is one of phased evolution. In the latter part of 2010, work was under way for enhanced bulk file management, additional work to expose functionality (e.g. sanctions monitoring) as services, and a 'technology refresh', of which DB2 support would be one part.  

Despite this activity, there seemed to be dwindling sales for MTS and there were fewer announcements from ACI for this product than for most of its other flagships. For instance, in early 2008, ACI trumpeted 49 new customers in 2007 and gave a breakdown of most of these (eg. 14 for Base24-eps), but there was no mention of MTS. Jonathan Eber, director, product management for MTS, claimed 30 customers, including seven or eight in Europe, three in Australia and a recent first recruit, which he declined to name, in the Middle East, replacing Logica's Bess. However, MTS was on the way out at this time at CBA in Australia, to be replaced by Clear2Pay's Open Payment Framework, and would also be replaced, along with Base24, at BankWest, as this acquired bank was brought into CBA.