IBM Power8 infrastructure to support US real-time payments system
Real-time payments system coming to the US in 2017
The Clearing House (TCH), the driving force behind the real-time payments modernisation in the US, has opted for IBM’s hardware.
Following an evaluation process, IBM’s Power8 based system infrastructure – running Linux and AIX operating systems – was selected as the hosting platform.
The new real-time payments platform is being delivered by UK-based Vocalink, and will be rolled out to major US banks in 2017. It will be “the first-of-its-kind payments system in the US”, Vocalink says.
IBM and Vocalink ran performance and resiliency tests of the payments service on a set of enterprise-class Power Systems. The IBM Power8-based infrastructure supported a sustained 2,500 transactions per second. Vocalink says this is a record result for its application, as the company previously offered its real-time banking solutions on x86-based infrastructure.
TCH currently clears around $2 trillion in payments per day. The new platform will enable it “to process millions of bank payments settled daily, in real-time, in a security-rich environment”, says Vocalink.
Once fully implemented (as mentioned above, the roll-out will start with the largest US banks in 2017), the real-time payments platform “will provide a hub that is accessible to all financial institutions and allow customers to use their existing accounts at financial institutions to send and receive payments”.
Tom Statnick, CIO at TCH, describes the initiative as “a revolution in the payments market”.
Earlier this year, FIS, Jack Henry & Associates and ACI Worldwide also pledged support for this initiative.
Will everyone really benefit from the real-time payments coming to the US? Can the US regulator mandate the banking sector to adopt it? And what are the chances of this new faster payments system becoming ubiquitous? Banking Technology digs deeper, past the hype.
