ACI Worldwide and Microsoft partner to boost real-time payments

By Delisha Fernandes

ACI Worldwide, a real-time payments software, has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to help financial institutions and technical services enable instant payments transactions faster through ACI’s Real-Time Payments Cloud (RTPC) platform.

Hosted in the Microsoft Azure environment, ACI RTPC is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that provides a payments interface between financial institutions and instant payments infrastructure, including The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments (RTP) Network and The Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service in the US

“By hosting ACI’s Real-Time Payments Cloud in Microsoft Azure, financial institutions will now have access to an award-winning, end-to-end solution to enable their processing of 24/7 payments,” said Craig Ramsey, Head of Real-Time Payments at ACI Worldwide. “In the U.S., the platform allows financial institutions and technical service providers to onboard to Real-Time Payments and FedNow, offering simplicity of operation and interoperability with both services.”

ACI’s RTPC helps financial institutions of all sizes gain access to both domestic instant payment networks: RTP and the FedNow Service. In addition, ACI’s relationship with Microsoft supports ACI’s AI-powered anti-fraud processing model— featuring patented proprietary incremental learning technology—that allows clients to run payments operations securely and with high resiliency, all while protecting transactions and financial institutions’ and aggregators’ privacy.

“We’re proud to have worked with ACI to create a fully cloud-native environment that enables intercommunication between different systems across the payments ecosystem,” said Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. “With the ability to exchange data in an interoperable manner, we’re excited for the new benefits this will provide financial institutions and their customers—helping speed payments, improve fraud management, and unlock new areas of efficiency and ways of doing business.”

ACI RTPC is the byproduct of ACI’s decades of experience processing real-time transactions for financial institutions on every continent, currently supporting 25 schemes across the globe. ACI Worldwide is fully certified for the FedNow Service and is a designated FedNow Instant Payment Pioneer, having supported the service with the Federal Reserve as part of its pilot program.