Best New Product: Kabira's High-Capacity Processing Software

  The explosion in electronic payments has many transaction processors approaching the limits of their capacities. The introduction of San Mateo, Calif.-based Kabira Technologies Inc.'s high-capacity processing software could help processors handle the escalating volumes.
  It also helped earned Kabira the honor of winning this year's Cards&Payments 2007 Best in Payments Best New Product award. The Kabira Payment Switch software performs acquiring and switching of electronic payment transactions, and Kabira Financial Authorization software supports immediate transaction authorizations.
  Kabira officials estimate that worldwide electronic transaction volume will increase to 29 billion transactions in 2009 from 19 billion in 2004. And that huge growth also will help push down the average revenue per transaction to 81 cents by 2010 from $1.36 in 2000, an overall decline of 54 cents per transaction.
  To answer the need for faster transactions, Kabira, which has concentrated on handling processing for the telecommunications industry, designed a 64-bit memory platform that the company claims can handle more than 50,000 transactions per second. Kaushik Roy, Kabira's director of product marketing, admits that no one in the payments industry needs anything quite that fast and that such speeds have been reached only in the company's laboratory.
  Indeed, many processors process only about 50 transactions per second, even during peak periods, and probably do not need Kabira's services at all, Roy says, at least for now. However, rising volumes eventually will drive more processors to search for more-powerful solutions, he adds, noting many processors are struggling to process 300 to 500 transactions per second without experiencing any slowdowns.
  Kabira can help multiply their capacity several times over, Roy says. "We can do 5,000 transactions per second, but even [processors] who are just crossing the 200 threshold are the ones coming to talk to us," he says.
  The company's experience in providing processing for telecom giants, including AT&T and France Telecom, serves the company well, Roy says. Telecoms sometimes had redundant technology, but they were expected to deal with an exponential increase in the number of calls, up to millions every minute, and many did it by installing Kabira software, he says.
  Likewise, "payment systems have been in place for 20 years," Roy says, and with many processors already trying to handle hundreds of transactions per second, they eventually will have to migrate to something like Kabira software. "Now we are ready to expand our footprint [in payments]," he says.
  Kabira's processing software "has a pretty bright potential," says Mike Harris, senior vice president of Speer & Associates Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based consultancy.
  However, it probably will take quite some time before the payment industry adopts Kabira's technology on a broad scale, he adds. Processors have spent vast amounts of money building their transaction infrastructure, and they will not be eager to replace it.
  "It's something that's going to take time to be adopted in the marketplace," Harris says of Kabira's processing software.
  Roy believes the switchover is inevitable, however, as the old mainframes used by processors will become increasingly outmoded and more expensive to maintain. "Our technology is becoming more relevant day by day," he says.
  This year's runners up were...
  * Discover Financial Services' Cash Over on Credit
  * Metavante Prepaid Card Internet Bill Payment
  * First Data FD-100 Payment Terminal
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