IBM And Viewpointe Plan ‘NextGeneration Payments System’

LAS VEGAS - (05/25/06) – IBM and Viewpointe announced ajoint effort Wednesday to develop a national on-demand paymentssystem that will allow financial service companies to store andaccess billions of images and payment data instantly for paymentprocessing, customer service and information delivery. Thefive-year, $174 million initiative calls for IBM to build the nextgeneration payments system using the current Viewpointe nationalimage archive of almost 80 billion check images. The system isdesigned for 24x7 high availability and to be capable of serving3,500 images every second. Launching of the project, announced atthe BAI Transpay Conference, comes just days after Viewpointeannounced it has become the first national check clearing networkto connect with the Federal Reserve’s 12 banks, thenation’s leading check-clearing system. IBM is a part ownerof Viewpointe, along with JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America,SunTrust Banks and U.S. Bancorp. Viewpointe’s nationalarchive, which is operated by IBM and designed with IBM technology,comprises about 70% of all archived check images in the U.S. and isaccessed by banks more than three million times a day. TheViewpointe exchange is one of four private-sector check exchangesvying to become the national standard, along with Metavante’sEndpoint Exchange, SVPCO-Electronic Clearing Service, which is alsoowned by large banks, and Fiserv’s ClearingNetwork.