Immediate Payments
Delivering real time payments solutions
VocaLink offers Immediate Payments; an innovative product from
enabling account to account credit transfers in near real time,
between participating banks.
Immediate Payments retains the key characteristics and
advantages of the award-winning UK Faster Payments infrastructure -
24x7x365 availability, reliability, robustness, scalability and
speed.
Immediate Payments consists of three main components:
- A high performance payment switch that delivers payment and
confirmation messages between paying and beneficiary institutions.
This validates, routes and delivers messages in a matter of
milliseconds
- A back office function that provides reports, enquiry
facilities and a User Interface. The back office also provides the
interface to the nominated settlement agent to manage liquidity and
effect settlement.
- The VocaLink Multi-Channel Gateway
(MCG) that provides access to the service from mobile devices,
on-line, pre-paid and other emerging technologies. This gateway
provides authentication, authorisation and look-up facilities that
enable messages received to be validated, converted and input into
the central switch.
Immediate Payments can be implemented in almost any country
across the globe. The back office and MCG components can be
"localised" to comply with local business rules and standards and
the core product is able to have a service wrapper applied. This
ensures it can be embedded within existing technical and
operational infrastructures.
The MCG provides a real-time solution that allows bank customers
to initiate payments from their mobile phones, using a proxy such
as a mobile phone number to identify the beneficiary. The mobile
phone number is converted to a bank account or a credit/debit card
number, which enables a standard payment instruction to be
submitted to the designated real-time payments system. The MCG sits
within the inter-bank payments infrastructure and supports
connections to any number of banks, enabling some or all of the
participant banks within a particular payment scheme to offer
mobile payments to their customers.
Immediate Payments is designed to be licensed to payment
processors, who can integrate the product within a full end-to-end
service offering and operate the service locally. VocaLink can
provide 24x7 second line maintenance support for the product from
within the UK. Alternatively, Immediate Payments may be deployed as
part of a VocaLink hosted or managed service.
Benefits to banks
For banks with existing mobile channel infrastructures,
Immediate Payments provides a route to leverage the substantial
investments they have already made in mobile payments
technology.
Banks without mobile channel capabilities will find that Immediate
Payments has the advantage of removing many barriers to
entry.
In an increasingly competitive market, Immediate Payments offers
all banks new products and services. This ensures existing
customers are retained and new customers attracted, in tandem with
implementing new streams of revenue.
Benefits to corporates and small businesses
Corporate customers will benefit from improved cash-flow,
real-time information and the new services delivered at a
lower-price point than Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS)
payments.
Small businesses and sole traders recognise the benefits of
receiving payments this way, removing their reliance on cash and
reducing the burden of receiving and processing cheques.
Commercial options
The customer can take Immediate Payments in three forms:
- The full Immediate Payments product
- The switch and back office only
- The Multi-Channel Gateway only.
Depending on the nature of the specific engagement, we would be
happy to discuss any of the above in further detail.
Email us to find out
more...