ACI Worldwide, a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, today announced that Westpac New Zealand has completed a wide-ranging banking technology transformation, underpinned by ACI’s powerful and comprehensive Universal Payments (UP) portfolio of solutions. Westpac NZ, one of New Zealand’s leading retail, corporate and investment banks, has adopted UP real-time payments and fraud prevention solutions with Agile methodology and DevOps practices through ACI.

Westpac NZ, a long-standing ACI customer, is utilizing ACI’s UP Immediate Payments solution as its financial transaction hub, orchestrating payments across channels, networks and payment types, and settling to any clearing stream in real-time. Core payment processing is handled by ACI’s market-leading UP Retail Payments solution which acquires, authenticates, switches and authorizes financial transactions across multiple channels. The implementation allows Westpac NZ to make changes at speed and rapidly scale up operations to overcome market challenges.

“Building on our close collaborative relationship with ACI, it was logical to partner with them as we shifted to DevOps methodology and practices,” said Dawie Olivier, CIO, Westpac NZ. “Implementing ACI’s retail payments solution on Linux positions us to fully capitalize on the transformation of both our IT culture and technology stack. We can leverage capabilities across the solutions that are part of ACI’s Universal Payments Framework, and bring them together in a multitude of innovative products.”

The ability to detect fraud – and well as process payments – in real-time has also become a competitive differentiator for Westpac NZ, as the bank is the first tobenefit from the new capabilities of ACI’s UP Payments Risk Management solution. The solution’s scalable, high-processing transactional throughput delivers real-time adaptive machine learning and the ability to pattern match, so that fraud trends can be identified before they impact the bank’s customers or the bank itself.

“Westpac NZ is a shining example of how a long-established bank can transform its IT culture and operations to become nimbler, and supply customers with innovative solutions,” said Phillip Finnegan, General Manager, Pacific, ACI Worldwide. “ACI’s UP solutions provide the underlying technology, but it’s the company’s agile implementation approach that has made this a truly transformative project that has sped up time to market, enabled innovation, and – crucially – reduced the risk of operating in a real-time world.”