Overview
Alaric's flagship offering is a relatively new Java-based payments platform, Authentic. The company has had steady progress with this and has around 35 clients. Although not currently as well known as some of its competitors, Alaric has built a good international user list and its system was chosen by Oracle as the pivotal payments engine piece in this supplier's Consumer Payments Services Hub. The company also has a fraud detection system, Fractals.
Corporate Overview
Alaric was set up in 1997 in the UK by a number of experienced payments system professionals. It provided support services for the AST/Transact-derived UM20 system, which covered funds transfer and card processing. The development of the new system commenced in 1999. The company now has offices in the US, Australia and Malaysia, with a development centre in the latter, set up in 2007 and with 32 staff here by the end of 2010 (by this stage there were 35 staff in the UK). Common competitors have been ACI, Fidelity and S1. The company claims to have increased revenues by 40 to 45 per cent in each of the last couple of years.
Summary History
1997 – Alaric is set up by a number of former AST/S2 employees with backing from two venture capital companies, Foresight Group and NVM Private Equity (which remain in place today, the latter providing Alaric's chairman). Two years earlier, S2 Systems, the software subsidiary of Stratus Computers, had acquired UK-based AST/Transact and its proprietary UM20 payments system running on a Stratus VOS platform. S2 decided to replace UM20 with its OpeN/2 platform. A number of ATS staff were made redundant. Alaric was set up by ex-staff to offer support to the UM20 customers, including adding Y2K compliance. Alaric was king of the Visigoths and the name was apparently chosen as the new company wanted to 'sack the S2 empire'. S2 was later bought by ACI (2005).
1999 – Aware that it was relying solely on maintenance revenue, Alaric set about building a new payments platform. Two UM20 customers were recruited as development partners/pilots: Cornèr Banca in Switzerland, the third largest bank in the country, and Yorkshire Building Society in the UK. The development was done in Java and the system was
launched as Authentic.
2001 – Alaric adds a Java-based fraud detection system, Fractals. Cornèr Banca signs for this. Signs partnership with Oracle.
2005 – Alaric has a major breakthrough when American Express signs a global licence for Authentic. S2 and ACI were beaten at the shortlist stage. Amex has standardised on the system and is now using it to support more than 350 million transactions per month.
2008 – Offices are set up in the US and Australia, plus a development centre in Kuala Lumpur.
2010 – Alaric claims to have added 15 new-name customers during the year.
Product suite
At the heart of Alaric's offerings is the switching system, Authentic. It is meant to support integration of new payments channels and systems, with EFT switching and authorisation for card issuers, acquirers, switches and processors, supporting ATM and POS networks and other payment channels. It has been described by director (and ex-ACI), Steve Lomax, as equivalent in scope
to ACI's Base24. There were around 35 users by the end of 2010.
The solution is touted for wrapping legacy systems (as has been the case at Kuwait Finance House, for instance, see below). Although originally designed for EFT switching, Alaric claims that Authentic can be leveraged as a wholesale payment hub, handling formats such as ISO 20022, and as payments integration middleware.Authentic is written in Java and can support any compliant platform, including Unix, Windows and Linux, with Oracle and DB2 as database options. It is based on a granular object-oriented design and is highly configurable. Examples of objects are tasks
such as check floor limit or validate currency. It ships pre-configured but users can adapt the existing business logic or add new logic, including validation rules. Cornèr Banca runs the system across both Sun Solaris and HP-UX. IBM's AIX is also an option. A fair few users have Linux. The same version runs on any platform, with no code changes needed, and at all customer sites. Alaric claims the system could run on other platforms such as HP's Tandem-derived NonStop if there was the demand.
There is a messaging component, Message Mapper, for message transformation, for mapping formats such as ISO 8583 to XML and ISO 20022 to ISO 8583, fixed fields or tagged formats such as Swift. It was part of Authentic from the outset and is an integral part of the offering. Alaric has said it could be taken in its own right but it has not been sold on this basis to date.In June 2010, Oracle and Alaric announced benchmarks for Authentic running with Oracle's GoldenGate data integration and
replication offering. The tests saw the Oracle components used to offload real-time transactional reporting to a reporting database and to implement active-active database configuration while supporting a 100 million cardholder database for authorisations. Authentic was running on five of Oracle's Sun Sparc Enterprise T5240 application servers using Solaris 10 (each powered by two UltraSparc T2 Plus processors and 32 GB of memory) and Oracle database 11g with Oracle Real Application Clusters running on Sun Sparc Enterprise M9000 servers (each with twelve SPARC64 VII processors and 192 GB of memory).
Authentic recorded throughput of 10,864 transactions per second with an average response time of 200 milliseconds. GoldenGate enabled bi-directional replication between two active-active sites simulated as being 800 miles apart, the system delivering throughput of 9348 transactions per second without degradation of response times.
The fraud detection system for card issuers and acquirers, Fractals, uses a predictive model, with the ability to 'learn' over time, rather than a neural model. It was added in 2001 and is also written in Java. Although originally developed for card fraud detection, Alaric claims Fractals is also suitable for anti-money laundering (AML) and enterprise fraud detection. There were around twelve users of this by the end of 2010. The software division of Euronet Worldwide signed in 2004 to distribute
Fractals; Euronet itself implemented the system in 2006.
A new release of Fractals, due for availability in Q1 2013, is intended to add enterprise capabilities across internal and external data sources for real-time detection of Card Not Present fraud, plus a mobile online alert capability. Alaric CEO, Mike Alford, said in May 2012 that he expected the company to close eight deals in the first quarter of its new financial year (to 30th June),
with fraud detection the hottest area at this time. Two of the pending deals were for Fractals from US banks; there was also an Authentic deal in the pipeline from Asia Pacific. 'There are some horrendous losses when you go out into the market and get below the surface,' he said. He believed some of the worst publicised security breaches, such as at Princeton-based Heartland Payment Systems (130 million cardholder details hacked) and Atlanta-based Global Payments (potentially two million
cardholder details hacked), took twelve months or more to discover. With the new release of Fractals, it should be possible to spot such breaches much earlier, he claimed.
Authentic Technical Details
First developed: 2000.
Commercially available: 2000.
Origins: Created from scratch. Not a successor of a legacy product
Original platform: Stratus, IBM, SUN, HP, Dell - anything that supports Java/Oracle/DB2.
Current server platforms: As above.
Current client platforms: Windows based PCs
Method of holding data: Uses either Oracle or DB2 database.
Language written in: Java.
Alaric's flagship offering is a relatively new Java-based payments platform, Authentic. The company has had steady progress with this and has around 35 clients. Although not currently as well known as some of its competitors, Alaric has built a good international user list and its system was chosen by Oracle as the pivotal payments engine piece in this supplier's Consumer Payments Services Hub. The company also has a fraud detection system, Fractals.
Corporate Overview
Alaric was set up in 1997 in the UK by a number of experienced payments system professionals. It provided support services for the AST/Transact-derived UM20 system, which covered funds transfer and card processing. The development of the new system commenced in 1999. The company now has offices in the US, Australia and Malaysia, with a development centre in the latter, set up in 2007 and with 32 staff here by the end of 2010 (by this stage there were 35 staff in the UK). Common competitors have been ACI, Fidelity and S1. The company claims to have increased revenues by 40 to 45 per cent in each of the last couple of years.
Summary History
1997 – Alaric is set up by a number of former AST/S2 employees with backing from two venture capital companies, Foresight Group and NVM Private Equity (which remain in place today, the latter providing Alaric's chairman). Two years earlier, S2 Systems, the software subsidiary of Stratus Computers, had acquired UK-based AST/Transact and its proprietary UM20 payments system running on a Stratus VOS platform. S2 decided to replace UM20 with its OpeN/2 platform. A number of ATS staff were made redundant. Alaric was set up by ex-staff to offer support to the UM20 customers, including adding Y2K compliance. Alaric was king of the Visigoths and the name was apparently chosen as the new company wanted to 'sack the S2 empire'. S2 was later bought by ACI (2005).
1999 – Aware that it was relying solely on maintenance revenue, Alaric set about building a new payments platform. Two UM20 customers were recruited as development partners/pilots: Cornèr Banca in Switzerland, the third largest bank in the country, and Yorkshire Building Society in the UK. The development was done in Java and the system was
launched as Authentic.
2001 – Alaric adds a Java-based fraud detection system, Fractals. Cornèr Banca signs for this. Signs partnership with Oracle.
2005 – Alaric has a major breakthrough when American Express signs a global licence for Authentic. S2 and ACI were beaten at the shortlist stage. Amex has standardised on the system and is now using it to support more than 350 million transactions per month.
2008 – Offices are set up in the US and Australia, plus a development centre in Kuala Lumpur.
2010 – Alaric claims to have added 15 new-name customers during the year.
Product suite
At the heart of Alaric's offerings is the switching system, Authentic. It is meant to support integration of new payments channels and systems, with EFT switching and authorisation for card issuers, acquirers, switches and processors, supporting ATM and POS networks and other payment channels. It has been described by director (and ex-ACI), Steve Lomax, as equivalent in scope
to ACI's Base24. There were around 35 users by the end of 2010.
The solution is touted for wrapping legacy systems (as has been the case at Kuwait Finance House, for instance, see below). Although originally designed for EFT switching, Alaric claims that Authentic can be leveraged as a wholesale payment hub, handling formats such as ISO 20022, and as payments integration middleware.Authentic is written in Java and can support any compliant platform, including Unix, Windows and Linux, with Oracle and DB2 as database options. It is based on a granular object-oriented design and is highly configurable. Examples of objects are tasks
such as check floor limit or validate currency. It ships pre-configured but users can adapt the existing business logic or add new logic, including validation rules. Cornèr Banca runs the system across both Sun Solaris and HP-UX. IBM's AIX is also an option. A fair few users have Linux. The same version runs on any platform, with no code changes needed, and at all customer sites. Alaric claims the system could run on other platforms such as HP's Tandem-derived NonStop if there was the demand.
There is a messaging component, Message Mapper, for message transformation, for mapping formats such as ISO 8583 to XML and ISO 20022 to ISO 8583, fixed fields or tagged formats such as Swift. It was part of Authentic from the outset and is an integral part of the offering. Alaric has said it could be taken in its own right but it has not been sold on this basis to date.In June 2010, Oracle and Alaric announced benchmarks for Authentic running with Oracle's GoldenGate data integration and
replication offering. The tests saw the Oracle components used to offload real-time transactional reporting to a reporting database and to implement active-active database configuration while supporting a 100 million cardholder database for authorisations. Authentic was running on five of Oracle's Sun Sparc Enterprise T5240 application servers using Solaris 10 (each powered by two UltraSparc T2 Plus processors and 32 GB of memory) and Oracle database 11g with Oracle Real Application Clusters running on Sun Sparc Enterprise M9000 servers (each with twelve SPARC64 VII processors and 192 GB of memory).
Authentic recorded throughput of 10,864 transactions per second with an average response time of 200 milliseconds. GoldenGate enabled bi-directional replication between two active-active sites simulated as being 800 miles apart, the system delivering throughput of 9348 transactions per second without degradation of response times.
The fraud detection system for card issuers and acquirers, Fractals, uses a predictive model, with the ability to 'learn' over time, rather than a neural model. It was added in 2001 and is also written in Java. Although originally developed for card fraud detection, Alaric claims Fractals is also suitable for anti-money laundering (AML) and enterprise fraud detection. There were around twelve users of this by the end of 2010. The software division of Euronet Worldwide signed in 2004 to distribute
Fractals; Euronet itself implemented the system in 2006.
A new release of Fractals, due for availability in Q1 2013, is intended to add enterprise capabilities across internal and external data sources for real-time detection of Card Not Present fraud, plus a mobile online alert capability. Alaric CEO, Mike Alford, said in May 2012 that he expected the company to close eight deals in the first quarter of its new financial year (to 30th June),
with fraud detection the hottest area at this time. Two of the pending deals were for Fractals from US banks; there was also an Authentic deal in the pipeline from Asia Pacific. 'There are some horrendous losses when you go out into the market and get below the surface,' he said. He believed some of the worst publicised security breaches, such as at Princeton-based Heartland Payment Systems (130 million cardholder details hacked) and Atlanta-based Global Payments (potentially two million
cardholder details hacked), took twelve months or more to discover. With the new release of Fractals, it should be possible to spot such breaches much earlier, he claimed.
Authentic Technical Details
First developed: 2000.
Commercially available: 2000.
Origins: Created from scratch. Not a successor of a legacy product
Original platform: Stratus, IBM, SUN, HP, Dell - anything that supports Java/Oracle/DB2.
Current server platforms: As above.
Current client platforms: Windows based PCs
Method of holding data: Uses either Oracle or DB2 database.
Language written in: Java.
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