The Faster Payments Gateway solution offered by partners Oracle and VocaLink meets the new regulatory requirements banks will face under Sepa. It has been proven in one of the most challenging payments environments in global banking - at Voca where key elements of the solution and platform support over 100 million global transactions each day, worth over €4.5 billion annually for 100,000 businesses, including all of the FTSE 100.

In Europe (where new Sepa rules apply to clearers from January 2008, and to all banks and corporates in May 2008) Voca is the largest processor of direct debit and direct credit transactions. It offers a global service with multi-currency capability and direct access to corporates through its new IP-based submission channel.

The Voca technology that forms a key element of the Faster Payments Gateway today drives Direct Debits and over 90% of salaries in one of the world’s leading financial centres securely and without fail.

The Gateway is built around a real-time messaging engine that provides banks with access to the Faster Payments Network using the ISO8583 messaging protocol.

The construction and validation of messages in line with this messaging protocol is complex and demands features such as accurate timing of responses, automatic initiation of reversals, duplicate detection and guaranteed delivery. The need to respond in real-time, coupled with volumes of up to hundreds of transactions per second, make this an extremely demanding interface for the banks to develop, test and certify.

The Gateway provides this interface out of the box, which helps to speed up deployment, and reduces the project risk. The Gateway meets all compliance needs for participants in the Faster Payments Scheme and supports step-by-step migration to the Faster Payments Service.

It offers high availability and performance without requiring expensive or proprietary hardware. The state-of-the-art architecture is future-proof, allowing the system to be extended to meet future requirements at significantly less cost when compared to proprietary, legacy platforms.

The functionality of the Gateway embraces all aspects of the clearing process:

Receiver functionality, applicable to receivers of payments (beneficiary banks)
Sender functionality, applicable to senders of payments (paying banks)
Functionality common to both receiver and sender
Integration functionality, allowing interfacing to the bank back office systems.

It incorporates VocaLink Switch technology and the VocaLink Payments Dashboard.

SEPA

Clearers can also leverage Oracle i-flex solutions to define a Sepa roadmap for both large-value corporate payments and high-volume bulk payments, allowing convergence of these two payment streams within one model.

Significant features of the i-flex Sepa solution include:

Connectivity to external infrastructure (TARGET2, STEP2) over SWIFTNet Protocols
Support for formats, standards and messages specific to TARGET2 and STEP2
MT to MX conversions and bulking/de-bulking in accordance with the new standards and systems
TARGET2 Cash and Liquidity Management
EBA STEP2 Credeuro and M-PEDD (forthcoming)
Comprehensive rules engine that helps banks modify processes to align as per their business rules
Connectivity options for configuring existing back-office applications to the SEPA hub
Provision for extensions to forthcoming infrastructure, standards and formats
Compliance to SEPA regulations such as SEPA Scheme Rule Books published by EPC and the EU Directive 2560/2001