Legacy vs. Open Systems

Time Travel: The Changing Payments Landscape

Solution providers are moving away from proprietary systems to open-systems environments, driven by the demand for payments systems that provide a lower total cost per transaction. The expense of maintaining proprietary operating systems cannot be easily justified when open systems, which provide high availability in mission-critical environments, are already being used by leading institutions worldwide. Ten years ago, those in the market for payments solutions could chose from several global players offering applications that ran on a variety of platforms including:

• ACI Worldwide: HP
• Connex (Deluxe): HP Non-Stop
• Oasis: Unix
• S2 Systems: Stratus VOS
• Arksys: IBM iSeries (AS400)
• Mosaic Software: Microsoft and IBM AIX (Unix)

Today, there are two global providers of payments systems solutions: ACI Worldwide and S1.

In addition to consolidation, other forces have affected the payments solution landscape. With the sunset of Base24, an industry-wide conversion from proprietary environments to open systems is reaching completion. S1, with its Mosaic/Postilion software, preceded competitors into the open-systems space over ten years ago. A decade of lessons learned in serving the needs of some of the world’s largest institutions means S1 understands the challenges faced by payments solutions providers in making the move to open-systems environments.

Today, S1 has more than 300 installations of its open-systems payments solutions.