The UP Framework is at the core of ACI’s Universal Payments strategy to enable end-to-end enterprise payments. It is a set of technologies and frameworks that orchestrate all aspects of payments processing for any payment type, any channel, any currency and any network. Combined with ACI’s leading solutions, it delivers an innovative architecture that bridges existing systems and future needs.
ACI’s UP Framework enables customers to adopt an enterprise payments strategy, moving beyond monolithic applications to loosely coupled, service-oriented solutions. Both flexible and functionally rich, the UP Framework enables institutions to evolve their payments processing from legacy platforms to a new, componentized architecture that is capable of managing payments of all types and from all channels in a consistent, efficient and profitable manner.
How does it work?
The UP Framework extracts core payments functionality from applications and exposes the business logic as well-defined, standards-based service interfaces. These service interfaces unlock the intrinsic value of the business logic and allow it to be more easily shared across ACI’s products and existing payment solutions. Approaching payments in this manner radically reduces process duplication, which reduces the need for duplicate infrastructure and ultimately leads to lower overall costs, better reuse and greater processing efficiency. Well-defined service interfaces also enable more streamlined interaction between ACI solutions and existing customer assets, preserving IT investments and shortening the delivery cycles for implementation and new product innovation.
ACI’s Universal Payments Platform paves the way to true enterprise payments. Common business logic inherent in ACI’s payment solutions, along with shared data models based on ACI’s Payment Information Model (PIM), are incorporated into the UP Framework. The result is an enterprise platform that allows financial institutions to view payments corporate-wide and implement a service-oriented architecture that optimizes business processes regardless of payment type, currency, entry channel or settlement mechanism.
ACI UPF provides a flexible and functionally rich framework based on a componentized architecture that is capable of providing a robust, consistent and efficient payment platform.
This Architecture, depicted above, is composed of 4 main areas that are described in subsequent sections.
· Platform – the payments processing and business operations servers
· Tools – applications for extending and testing the platform
· Horizontal Frameworks – underlying technology components used within the platform
· Cartridges – application modules developed for use within the platform
The UPF technology provides a common platform through which payments services can be orchestrated. These services can be from ACI’s existing solutions, or any financial institutions provided services that are needed across the full workflow of any payment.
The platform provides a common layer for integration, eliminating inefficient point-to-point interfaces, the solution provides endpoints that needs to be defined only once, but can be re-used many times for different services allowing for agility to respond quickly to new business initiatives and importantly new customer demands. Each endpoint protects other core systems from changes, and makes adoption of new services, products and technical requirements simple.
The UP Framework provides a central repository of payments data, and can interact with customer channels to provide real-time, personalized data.
The UP Framework forms the core of the applications and it is being widely adopted in every ACI solution offerings such as transaction banking, consumer solutions and other ACI solutions.
Benefits
· Provides a holistic view of the customer’s payments activity, regardless of how they decide to interact.
· Enables new customer channels to be supported through configuration which enables rapid deployment as new devices come to market.
· Provides a common service across devices, allowing customers to start a transaction on one channel, and complete it on another.
· Enables new ‘products’ to be configured rapidly, either by the use of new orchestrated services, or by the definition of existing services specific to the customer needs (e.g. special FX tiers).
· Drives specific customer outcomes via attributes within the payment flow by accessing other enhanced services that can be exposed through the UPF.
· Provides a tool for the management of different payment input formats that the customer might want to provide to you; enabling the customer to interact with you under their own needs not driven by the restrictions.
· Provides interface to CRM and loyalty applications to support enhanced authorization based on customer class or status.
