Hungary’s OTP Bank ties up with ACI Worldwide for instant payments

OTP Bank Group of Hungary, one of the biggest independent financial service providers in Central and Eastern Europe, has signed a deal with ACI Worldwide, a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, in its bid to transform its digital operations, especially instant payments. The bank will utilise the full range of ACI’s UP portfolio of solutions to drive its digital transformation strategy.

As a long-standing ACI customer, OTP Bank already utilises ACI’s UP Retail Payments Solution and UP Payments Risk Management Solution. As the bank continues its digital evolution, it will now leverage ACI’s API Manager capabilities and, in addition, implement UP Immediate Payments. Both solution sets will serve as the architectural foundation for the bank’s enterprise-wide open banking strategy.

“With the EU’s new PSD2 mandate, more Eastern and Central European countries are embarking on real-time and immediate payments initiatives,” said Mandy Killam, group president, ACI Worldwide. “Our UP solutions ensure that financial institutions can take advantage of this sea change by delivering openness while also ensuring the highest levels of privacy and data protection for their clients. Rather than simply ‘checking the boxes’ to meet the PSD2 mandate requirements, ACI’s UP solutions help clients to protect their existing business, grow revenues in the short term and place them in the pole position in the new open banking payments ecosystem.”

“Providing the best possible customer experience has been the focus of our bank since its inception. Consumers increasingly want new and innovative banking services. The advent of PSD2 and the launch of more real-time schemes will offer our customers more options as well as greater control and flexibility,” said Tibor Johancsik, CIO/COO, OTP Bank. “ACI’s UP solutions will be a significant element of our architecture, playing a substantial role in our own open banking strategy, enabling us to capitalize on the opportunities that PSD2 and real-time payment present.”

Key features of ACI UP solutions

UP Immediate Payments offers a complete range of capabilities for processing real-time payments; the solution provides connectivity, processing, origination, clearing and fraud detection across multiple real-time schemes, all on a single platform.
OTP will be using UP Immediate Payments for both the new domestic scheme in Hungary, which is mandatory and launches in 2018, as well as the pan-European schemes, including SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCTinst) and TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS).
ACI’s API manager capabilities are designed to support customers in developing a strategic approach to the emerging open banking payments ecosystem, and to provide the tools to meet established and emerging regulatory requirements including PSD2 and GDPR.
Key features of ACI’s API manager capabilities include connection to any front-end gateway, connection to any back-end system that a bank runs, providing a middleware API layer to help orchestrate the message flows and business logic.