ACI Worldwide | Secure Payments Solutions | Debbie Guerra

ACI is in all parts of the payments ecosystem, giving us an unmatched understanding of the broader payments industry with added security from fraud.  “We recently announced that we now power 25 domestic and pan-regional real-time schemes across six continents, including nine central infrastructures. We provide solutions to central banks, participant banks, and other payment service providers,” says Debbie Guerra, Chief Product Officer of ACI.

Unique Solutions

ACI Worldwide has recently launched Wallet Hub for merchants with access to 200+ digital wallets in 70+ countries. When merchants use ACI Wallet Hub, they gain access to many new and existing global and regional wallets via a single API integration. A single contract with ACI is needed to gain access to the Wallet Hub network and have a quicker time to market so customers can pay with their preferred digital wallet in any given region of the world. This includes many well-known wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, and these existing integration updates can also be managed via the wallet.

To continue offering a solid solution compared to competitors, ACI constantly modernizes and innovates its cloud solutions and develops new value-added services to keep its position as the global leader in real-time payments. Globally, ACI covers approximately one-third of the countries that offer real-time payment services, reaching about 1.8 billion people. ACI’s platform expansion responds to rapidly increasing real-time adoption rates worldwide. “Our decades of experience as a pioneer and trusted partner in real-time payments has allowed us to evolve our expertise to be a natural fit to empower payment networks, banks, merchants, and billers across the world to stay ahead of customer demand and increasing regulatory changes, as well as competitors for modern payments infrastructure with real-time,” added Guerra.

The company’s real-time implementations represent a significant long-term growth opportunity for ACI. The movement of funds within seconds rather than days unlock money — billions of dollars every day — usually tied up in inefficient payment systems and intermediaries. Money that people, businesses, and government could otherwise instantly put to work to generate value, drive growth, and enhance prosperity. Removing friction from payments also removes systemic limits on economic consumption and investment, lowers business costs, accelerates innovation, and improves financial inclusion. In the background, ACI is powering central banks and banks, merchants and billers, processors, and acquirers to facilitate end-to-end payments securely, reliably, and in real-time across the globe.

Serving Clients Worldwide

For Swedbank, a Nordic-Baltic banking group based in Stockholm, ACI turned compliance into a revenue driver across the enterprise. Under the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), a new European regulatory requirement, banks had to implement strong customer authentication (SCA) to authorize payments. This would add friction to the payment experience through additional authentication to checkout flows. Swedbank worked with ACI to achieve SCA exemptions with in-depth transaction risk analysis. The bank went beyond compliance in the European market and improved UX, reducing customer friction, with total loss from fraud reduced by 55 percent. 

ACI constantly enhances its payments platform to stay current with the latest payment innovations and consumer preferences. Its merchant customers can look forward to additional lenders in their BNPL solution, ACI PayAfter, more wallets in Wallet Hub, support for FedNow in Instant Pay, paying by link or chat, support for the marketplace, and other payouts and payment reconciliation. “Traditionally our in-store solutions were for Tier 1 merchants, but our ACI checkout solution will automatically support Android and Apple devices, broadening the access to Tier 2 & 3 merchants and manufacturers with a DTC model that includes physical stores,” elucidated Guerra.

Towards the Future

Banks are looking to provide consumers with all the features they want to remain on top of their wallets and continue creating revenue from card payments. New technologies are affecting all segments of the population, but traditional card rails are staying the same as electronic card payments are replacing cash payments. Watches are replacing plastic cards with digital wallets, so financial institutions need to adapt to these changes. To help customers understand and meet end-user needs, ACI is pushing issuing modernization. Financial institutions are moving to the cloud for greater agility to scale to peaks and troughs of payments and improve time to market with differentiating products.

These new, modernized payment methods across the payments ecosystem need to be secure. As such, ACI has recently expanded its Fraud Management solutions with proprietary technology and incremental learning, a patented machine-learning solution that adapts to changing payment behaviors. This solves the problem of machine learning model degradation and makes models last five times longer by refreshing over time. “At ACI we see ourselves as the real-time payments leading software provider as well as a key consultant on the journey to real-time. As such, we have created a platform to show real-world trends and insights on real-time payment adoption across the globe, Inside Real-Time,” explains Guerra. “This platform will be a tool for customers across the industry to not only learn from expert insights but also to share their knowledge and become real-time insiders.”