Securities Industry News - Oct 15 2004

LogicaCMG, Clear2Pay Offer Integrated Payments

As major banks move to centralize their payments operations on a single platform, LogicaCMG and Clear2Pay are responding with new solutions to enable banks to reduce costs and gain new efficiencies. LogicaCMG’s Payments Architecture (LPA) is designed to allow banks to re-engineer payments systems to support emerging business demands and technical architectures. Until now, banks’ disparate networks have often impeded the launch of new payments products, but LogicaCMG’s LPA encompasses all payments systems to facilitate the provision of flexible, automated and differentiated payments services.

Central banks, clearing houses, global, regional and domestic banks are expected to use LogicaCMG’s LPA solution, with associated functions such as real-time growth settlement, liquidity management, e-invoicing, payment pricing and cash reporting. Clear2Pay for its part is offering a new payments platform, the PayPark Bank Payment Hub, to simplify banks’ migration to a central payment system. An integrated payments engine decouples processes from their underlying functions, which allows banks using Clear2Pay’s solution to tweak either a process, or its underlying components, for optimal efficiency.

With banks promoting their payments business as a core strength, many are debating whether to migrate to a new platform, to outsource central processing under their own brand, or to outsource to another bank or processor. Clear2Pay concluded that regardless of a bank’s favored payments strategy, a flexible hub was a prerequisite for cost-efficient, client-driven payment products. As a solution designed to sit between a bank’s back office and multiple delivery channels, Clear2Pay’s PayPark Payments Hub supports the receipt and splitting of bulk payments, general ledger posting, reconciliation, internal controls and auditing.