IBM and Viewpointe Building National On Demand Payments System
REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY WILL ENABLE INDUSTRY-WIDE CHECK "IMAGE ON DEMAND"
May 24, 2006 – Las Vegas, NV – BAI Transpay Conference: IBM and Viewpointe, the nation’s leading provider of check image storage and exchange services, announced today that they are building architecture to support a National On Demand Payments System that will enable financial services companies to store and access billions of images and payment data for the purposes of payment processing, customer service and information delivery.
The five-year, $174 million deal calls for IBM to build the next generation payments system upon the current Viewpointe national image archive of nearly 80 billion check images -- used by the largest banks in the country. Designed for 24X7 high availability and to be capable of serving 3,500 images every second, the system will eliminate the technical barriers that once made industry-wide national check “Image on Demand” unattainable.
Viewpointe’s current national image archive, which is also operated by IBM and designed with IBM technology, is the nation’s largest (70% of total check images in the US) and most active, being accessed by banks more than 3 million times a day. Viewpointe’s archive is currently growing at the rate of about two billion images per month.
“Image on Demand” is the most efficient method of clearing check and related payment data in a post “Check 21” environment. Banks can access and download check images and payment data as needed from centralized repositories rather than send billions of images across multiple networks. Today Viewpointe customers are currently able to take advantage of “Image on Demand” through the ImageShare™ service; however, until now, the requirements to make such a system viable from an industry perspective were technically complex.
“We worked with our customers and IBM to create a next-generation payments platform that maps to the future technical and business needs of the financial services industry related to payment processing and information delivery,” said Lou Buglioli, Viewpointe CEO.
The National On Demand Payments System’s high availability and sub-second transaction speeds can allow banks that once relied upon vast telecommunications and redundant infrastructure, to reduce the costs associated with check payment processing.
The new system’s planned retrieval capability of more than 3,500 check images per second represents an enormous improvement over current systems, which typically process less than 100 check images per second.
“The Check 21 Act laid the policy framework for the industry’s move to a nationwide, fully digital payments system,” said Bruce Ross, IBM Global Technology Services, VP, Banking Industry. “Viewpointe’s National On Demand Payments System promises to reduce the technical barriers by leveraging IBM’s unparalleled capabilities in building real-time transaction networks that rely on 24x7 availability.”
Viewpointe: One of the World’s Largest Data Warehouses
With 243 IBM p-series and x-series servers, one petabyte of data on IBM Enterprise Storage Servers (disk), and eight petabytes of data on IBM LTO tape, Viewpointe currently houses one of the largest data warehouses in the world. IBM’s DB2 database technology will provide the engine to deliver industry-wide Image on Demand with retrieval rates that set new heights within the financial services industry.
About Viewpointe:
Viewpointe is the leading provider of check image processing and “Check 21” related services to the nation’s top financial institutions. Viewpointe operates the largest national archive of check images and information. It is the only institution able to provide image exchange on demand through ImageShare™ and direct bank to bank image exchange through Pointe2Pointe™. Viewpointe customers and connections include: BancorpSouth, Inc., Bank of America, BB&T, Compass, the Federal Reserve Banks, First Horizon National Corp., Fiserv, Frost Bankers, Inc., Harris, HSBC Bank USA, JP Morgan Chase & Co., National City Corporation, Southwest Corporate Federal Credit Union, Southwest Corporate Credit Union, SunTrust Bank, Synovus Financial Corporation, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and Zions Bancorporation. IBM is a minority owner in Viewpointe. For more information about Viewpointe and its services, please visit www.viewpointe.com
About IBM:
For more information on IBM, please go to www.ibm.com