The world of money transmission is constantly moving. The need for virtually instant details of financial instructions puts huge pressure on today's banking systems. In the UK for example all the main clearing banks are having to move to a new same day settlement system for electronic payments.

This initiative, driven by demanding consumer and government requirements, has added more costs to the banking system at a time when financial organisations are striving to streamline their business and reduce costs.

With the Oracle/Distra real-time payments solution, banks now have a way to deploy non-stop real-time payment systems in a more cost- and time-effective manner.

By using the latest technologies, the low cost payment platforms Oracle/Distra offer now perform and behave like much more expensive proprietary payment platforms, in time-frames to match ever-changing business needs.

There are two big challenges: deliver real-time transactions; and leverage real-time information to improve all-round business and financial performance.

With more payment types moving onto a real-time footing, bank’s traditional methods of transaction processing (eg large overnight batch runs) need to be changed to transmit and receive payment instructions, authorisations and acknowledgments in real-time.

For organisations without real-time-capable systems, this move can be hugely expensive and create massive disruption to both the business and IT environments.

The real-time aspect of the financial transaction should in best practice run from instruction initiation through to acknowledgment or confirmation. The process flow in organisations today typically touches a number of different systems and processes eg. account validation processes, fraud detection systems etc. So the more straight through processing a financial institution has for its business processes the more cost-effective and streamlined those processes are.

Alongside the move to real-time payments, comes the need for real time business analytics.

In the days of the batch processing window, there was time to spot erroneous or suspicious transactions or activity. If transactions complete within a smaller time window, the need for the right analytics in as close to real time as possible is essential.

The Oracle/Distra real time payment solution delivers a lower cost real time payments and analytics platform that allows financial institutions to develop a real time processing platform, or move to a lower cost alternative to current proprietary solutions. The presentation layer within the system provides treasury and operational users with a clear view of peaks and troughs, volumes, performance etc to manage liquidity and view how the switch is performing. As organisations consider appointing 'payments tsars' to oversee all aspects of payments within the bank, this is an invaluable real-time information tool.

The joint bank clearing company VocaLink itself has chosen the Oracle/Distra solution: