Mastercard and ACI Worldwide , a leading global provider of real-time digital payment software and solutions, today announced that Cámara de Compensación Electrónica (CCE) will utilize the ACI Enterprise Payments Platform to accelerate financial institutions’ access to Mastercard’s Instant Payment Service, the new real-time payments managed service that will enter Industry Testing in Peru later this year.
CCE is the first customer Mastercard and ACI will collaborate on following the announcement of their alliance in September 2020. Mastercard and ACI are working together to offer best-in-class central infrastructure, payments localization and access solutions to central banks, scheme operators, financial institutions, payment service providers, and other organizations launching real-time payments initiatives.
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CCE is a private institution that manages the clearing of financial institutions’ transfers, direct debits, credit installments, checks and bills of exchange. It initially launched its real-time payments scheme—Immediate Interbank Transfers (IIT)—in 2016 and is working with Mastercard to fully modernize Peru’s digital payments infrastructure. Today’s announcement means that ACI will combine its payments access and real-time message transformation technology with Mastercard’s Immediate Payments Service, the central infrastructure being deployed as a managed service using the ISO 20022 message standard to deliver an unmatched end-to-end offering for CCE. CCE’s IIT service operates 24/7; its transfers can be performed using internet or mobile banking and are processed in real time.
The ACI Enterprise Payments Platform will operate alongside Mastercard’s Immediate Payments Service to simplify and speed up connectivity for participants to Peru’s new real-time ISO 20022 scheme, ahead of Industry Testing, which will begin later this year. Financial institutions will be able to connect to the new scheme via new, modern APIs.
“The volume of immediate transfers that we process each month has more than quadrupled. In January 2020, we processed 580,000, a number that increased to more than 2.8 million per month by January 2021,” said Martín Santa María, CEO, Cámara de Compensación Electrónica (CCE). “Thanks to the Mastercard and ACI Worldwide partnership, we can exceed this growth, as both consumer and business demand for real-time payments rapidly increases across the country.”
“Modernizing a country’s payments infrastructure is a major undertaking and we have a long, global track record of successfully deploying real-time payment systems,” said Carlos Pontes, executive vice president, New Payment Platforms, LAC, Mastercard. “We are excited to continue our work with CCE together with ACI to develop a powerful and flexible real-time payments solution. This infrastructure will provide a platform for innovation to support the country’s economy, transforming the payments landscape for both financial institutions and their customers.”
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“Latin America is at the forefront of payments modernization, with Peru among several countries in the region planning to adopt real-time payments based on ISO 20022, with its potential high-value-add use cases. As these countries look to launch their own real-time payments schemes, they are turning to ACI and Mastercard, and we are excited to deliver Peru’s new real-time central infrastructure,” said Jeremy Wilmot, chief product officer, ACI Worldwide. “The combination of ACI and Mastercard technologies working together will accelerate adoption of real-time payments in Peru by supporting an easy onboarding path for the participants of the scheme.”
Mastercard’s multi-rail proposition enables people and organizations to send and receive money how, where and when they choose, across both card and account-to-account payments rails. Mastercard’s experience in real-time payments implementations includes the launch of The Clearing House’s RTP®—the transformative real-time payments system in the US—which was an evolution of Mastercard’s highly successful and reliable systems developed for Faster Payments in the UK, FAST in Singapore and PromptPay in Thailand. Mastercard is now providing real-time payments infrastructure for 12 of the top 50 GDP countries.
ACI currently supports 18 real-time domestic schemes around the world, including Zelle and The Clearing House in the US. Approximately 50 percent of the UK’s Faster Payments and 75 percent of Hungary’s GIRO transactions are processed through the ACI Low Value Real-Time Payments solution.
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