Overview
Oracle has a mix of its own and third party solutions, across a broad span of payments functionality. Clearly, Oracle is a huge company, with its traditional database and ERP roots. It has diversified through acquisitions, including those of Peoplesoft and Sun, and has bought a number of financial services applications, including I-flex Solutions and its core banking system, Flexcube.
The latter's payments module is part of Oracle's suite, along with a range of third party solutions and some acquired or home-grown offerings. Clearly, there is technical commonality, in that they support the Oracle database, but they come from different roots and there are different levels of integration.
Summary History
2001 – Oracle partners with emerging retail payment system supplier, UK-based Alaric.
2005 – Oracle buys stake from Citibank in India-based core banking system supplier, I-flex Solutions, giving it a majority holding.
2006 August – Oracle buys US-based Mantas, an AML specialist, in an all-cash deal worth• $122.6 million.
2007 August – Oracle buys US-base online identity theft and fraud software vendor, Bharosa.
2008 January – Oracle partners with Australian payments system supplier, Distra. This is for Distra Switch for card and payment processing including consumer/corporate payments, ATM and POS device driving, channel integration, authorisation request processing, and routing and connectivity to external parties such as processors, beneficiaries, card schemes and hosts.
2008 April – I-flex Solutions becomes Oracle Financial Services Software (Oracle FSS).
2009 April – Oracle agrees to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion.
2009 – Oracle extends partnership with Alaric, with this supplier's solution at the heart of Oracle's Consumer Payment Services Hub.
Product Suite
Oracle claims it can provide a full payments solution, including the technology and infrastructure. Oracle Payments is the central payment engine for Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle claims key features are a central payment engine, configurable formatting framework, flexible validation model, payment data repository, electronic payment transmission, support for various business payment models, dashboards for monitoring payment processes, credit card support including validation, authorisation and settlement, PIN-less debit card transactions, integration with leading payment processors, and open, extensible interfaces for integrating with other payment systems.
This is in part through its own offerings, particularly the payments portion of its I-flex Solutions-derived Flexcube, plus other in-house components such as Mantas for AML. There is the Flexcube SwiftNet Services Integrator (Flexcube SSI) including a messaging hub and business-specific tools that help banks implement SwiftNet services across various lines of business and market infrastructure services, such as Step2 and Target2 within SEPA. Flexcube SSI includes support for Swift FileAct and InterAct.
Oracle's payments hand is also made up of some third party components, including Alaric's payments switch and fraud detection offerings to underpin Oracle's Consumer Payment Services Hub. Alaric has been an Oracle partner since 2001, saw this extended to a full international distribution arrangement in 2007 and an announcement about joint development on the retail hub in late 2009. Alaric's Authentic system provides the multi-channel payment switching and authentication capability in the hub solution; Alaric's Fractals solution provides multi-instrument fraud detection and prevention capability. For ATM, POS, and payments information management, Oracle partners with Australian firm, Distra. Oracle has also worked with Vocalink to provide a solution for UK Faster Payments, with Distra part of this.
Mantas is apparently integrated with Fractals. However, even in this area of fraud, things do not seem overly clear. In 2009,
Oracle announced that real-time payments and online fraud detection combined with intelligent alert correlation capabilities were now part of a range of new features for Mantas. The system's extended functionality had been enabled, Oracle stated, by integration with its own Adaptive Access Manager and Complex Events Processing products.
Other components within the hub include Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, Oracle's Demantra for physical cash management, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Adaptive Access Manager from the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite, as well as high availability and disaster tolerant data integration solutions derived from GoldenGate Software.
The hub is meant to span device management, switching, security and authentication, reconciliations and settlement, data management, customer acquisition and cash management and control, as well as the technical platform.There is also Oracle Financial Gateway.
It is touted as a centralised framework for payments processing for banks and corporates. It enables a corporate to manage all payments from a single platform, and helps with the preparation, formatting, validation, approval and release of clean payment instructions to the bank or external payment system, including directly from ERP systems.
However, in this same space, in October 2010, Oracle signed with payments systems provider, Fundtech, and ERP connectivity specialist, Sierra Atlantic, to provide a solution to integrate bank payments and receivables processing systems with corporate clients' ERP systems. Joe Mazzetti, executive vice president for corporate development at Fundtech, said Oracle made the approaches as it sought to address the age-old problem of corporate-to-bank connectivity.
The combined solution, dubbed Seamless STP, is centred on Sierra's hosted BankON to take in files from Oracle's ERP systems and route them to Fundtech's Global PayPlus (GPP), sitting in front of a bank's existing channels. GPP passes the corporate payment instructions to banks around the world for payment execution. A bank could use Seamless STP to provide a single point of contact for its customers' multi-bank relationships, thereby giving corporate treasurers a single view of their cashflows. The hosted nature of the service means the partners are suggesting a short implementation cycle. California-based Sierra is a longstanding Oracle partner.
Strategy
Not always easy to work out. Further integration of the components and continued fleshing out of its own Flexcube functionality are on the cards. There has not been known progress to date with Alaric, although this supplier has made good progress under its own steam.
Oracle has a mix of its own and third party solutions, across a broad span of payments functionality. Clearly, Oracle is a huge company, with its traditional database and ERP roots. It has diversified through acquisitions, including those of Peoplesoft and Sun, and has bought a number of financial services applications, including I-flex Solutions and its core banking system, Flexcube.
The latter's payments module is part of Oracle's suite, along with a range of third party solutions and some acquired or home-grown offerings. Clearly, there is technical commonality, in that they support the Oracle database, but they come from different roots and there are different levels of integration.
Summary History
2001 – Oracle partners with emerging retail payment system supplier, UK-based Alaric.
2005 – Oracle buys stake from Citibank in India-based core banking system supplier, I-flex Solutions, giving it a majority holding.
2006 August – Oracle buys US-based Mantas, an AML specialist, in an all-cash deal worth• $122.6 million.
2007 August – Oracle buys US-base online identity theft and fraud software vendor, Bharosa.
2008 January – Oracle partners with Australian payments system supplier, Distra. This is for Distra Switch for card and payment processing including consumer/corporate payments, ATM and POS device driving, channel integration, authorisation request processing, and routing and connectivity to external parties such as processors, beneficiaries, card schemes and hosts.
2008 April – I-flex Solutions becomes Oracle Financial Services Software (Oracle FSS).
2009 April – Oracle agrees to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion.
2009 – Oracle extends partnership with Alaric, with this supplier's solution at the heart of Oracle's Consumer Payment Services Hub.
Product Suite
Oracle claims it can provide a full payments solution, including the technology and infrastructure. Oracle Payments is the central payment engine for Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle claims key features are a central payment engine, configurable formatting framework, flexible validation model, payment data repository, electronic payment transmission, support for various business payment models, dashboards for monitoring payment processes, credit card support including validation, authorisation and settlement, PIN-less debit card transactions, integration with leading payment processors, and open, extensible interfaces for integrating with other payment systems.
This is in part through its own offerings, particularly the payments portion of its I-flex Solutions-derived Flexcube, plus other in-house components such as Mantas for AML. There is the Flexcube SwiftNet Services Integrator (Flexcube SSI) including a messaging hub and business-specific tools that help banks implement SwiftNet services across various lines of business and market infrastructure services, such as Step2 and Target2 within SEPA. Flexcube SSI includes support for Swift FileAct and InterAct.
Oracle's payments hand is also made up of some third party components, including Alaric's payments switch and fraud detection offerings to underpin Oracle's Consumer Payment Services Hub. Alaric has been an Oracle partner since 2001, saw this extended to a full international distribution arrangement in 2007 and an announcement about joint development on the retail hub in late 2009. Alaric's Authentic system provides the multi-channel payment switching and authentication capability in the hub solution; Alaric's Fractals solution provides multi-instrument fraud detection and prevention capability. For ATM, POS, and payments information management, Oracle partners with Australian firm, Distra. Oracle has also worked with Vocalink to provide a solution for UK Faster Payments, with Distra part of this.
Mantas is apparently integrated with Fractals. However, even in this area of fraud, things do not seem overly clear. In 2009,
Oracle announced that real-time payments and online fraud detection combined with intelligent alert correlation capabilities were now part of a range of new features for Mantas. The system's extended functionality had been enabled, Oracle stated, by integration with its own Adaptive Access Manager and Complex Events Processing products.
Other components within the hub include Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, Oracle's Demantra for physical cash management, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Adaptive Access Manager from the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite, as well as high availability and disaster tolerant data integration solutions derived from GoldenGate Software.
The hub is meant to span device management, switching, security and authentication, reconciliations and settlement, data management, customer acquisition and cash management and control, as well as the technical platform.There is also Oracle Financial Gateway.
It is touted as a centralised framework for payments processing for banks and corporates. It enables a corporate to manage all payments from a single platform, and helps with the preparation, formatting, validation, approval and release of clean payment instructions to the bank or external payment system, including directly from ERP systems.
However, in this same space, in October 2010, Oracle signed with payments systems provider, Fundtech, and ERP connectivity specialist, Sierra Atlantic, to provide a solution to integrate bank payments and receivables processing systems with corporate clients' ERP systems. Joe Mazzetti, executive vice president for corporate development at Fundtech, said Oracle made the approaches as it sought to address the age-old problem of corporate-to-bank connectivity.
The combined solution, dubbed Seamless STP, is centred on Sierra's hosted BankON to take in files from Oracle's ERP systems and route them to Fundtech's Global PayPlus (GPP), sitting in front of a bank's existing channels. GPP passes the corporate payment instructions to banks around the world for payment execution. A bank could use Seamless STP to provide a single point of contact for its customers' multi-bank relationships, thereby giving corporate treasurers a single view of their cashflows. The hosted nature of the service means the partners are suggesting a short implementation cycle. California-based Sierra is a longstanding Oracle partner.
Strategy
Not always easy to work out. Further integration of the components and continued fleshing out of its own Flexcube functionality are on the cards. There has not been known progress to date with Alaric, although this supplier has made good progress under its own steam.
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