Unisys to Develop Next-Generation Electronic Check Payments System

The Federal Reserve Banks are replacing their existing system with a scalable, flexible, open system solution to meet both current and emerging requirements for electronic payment processing. The 12 Reserve Banks together are one of the United States’ largest processors of payments, including paper and electronic checks, for financial institutions.

Unisys will help the Federal Reserve Banks transition from their existing system to a solution capable of handling rapidly growing volumes of electronic checks and images. The Unisys solution is designed to provide a more streamlined and robust processing environment.

“We are committed to building a payment processing solution that effectively addresses the migration of financial institutions to electronic checks and images, and we believe that the approach we are taking through this contract with Unisys will help us achieve that objective,” said Pat Barron, retail payments product director, Federal Reserve System, and first vice president and chief operating officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Unisys will deploy its Open Payments Platform as the core of its solution for the Federal Reserve Banks. Unisys Open Payments Platform takes advantage of the economies and efficiencies that open source technology affords. It supports the processing of multiple types of file and message-based e-payments from numerous sources. The Unisys solution is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach incorporating industry standards, Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL), and Linux. The Open Payments Platform utilizes key components from Unisys partners Clear2Pay and Oracle Corporation: Clear2Pay’s SOA Bank Payment Hub and Oracle’s 10g Database and Payment Business Intelligence accelerator, the latter of which Oracle jointly developed with Unisys.

To meet the Fed’s high-volume performance requirements, Unisys is providing an open, fault-tolerant system. The payment solution will run on Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers based on multi-core Intel processors and running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

“This engagement with the Federal Reserve Bank continues a long tradition of partnering on payments innovation,” said Curt Girod, president of Global Financial Services at Unisys. “In this new project, Unisys will help the Reserve Banks harness the power of open source technology for electronic check payments in a way that is efficient, grows to adapt with their business and addresses their customers’ evolving needs.”