Financial Services

Financial Service organizations face a number of challenges, including the need to consolidate acquired systems and data, the need to provide superior customer services across multiple products and channels and the need to meet an increasingly complex web of compliance, privacy and regulatory needs. Whether your organization offers financial services, banking, capital markets or insurance solutions, the efficiency with which you do business can be dramatically increased by breaking down the barriers between systems and applications. The key to an agile infrastructure is a connected network of support systems, both across the organization and across its partners. Incompatible IT systems necessitate manual interventions across system boundaries, resulting in redundancy and errors. It is through removal of such barriers that information can be made available to those that need it, when they need it, both within the organization and out to subsidiaries and partners.

ENGIN powers some of the most demanding finance back-ends in the world ensuring connectivity to diverse financial networks, integrating disparate systems and enabling access to critical business data on legacy systems. ENGIN serves as switching platform that drives all critical system functions such as ATM's, Point Of Sale Terminals and credit / debit card issuer accounting and plastics generation and disbursement.

Agricultural Bank of China Agricultural Bank of China is currently using M2 Systems' RDS 3000 product on DEC VAX hardware running the VMS Operating System. In this environment, RDS3000 supports settlement authorization and all ATM functionality. Prior to the installation of the ENGIN products, each of the bank branches in China was a separate entity with no electronic communication channels. Transactions could take days, if not weeks, to be completed. Now, banks are connected electronically, and it is no longer necessary for banking customers to travel from branch to branch to complete transactions.

Alliance Data Systems Alliance Data Systems (ADS) operates nearly 140,000 point-of-sale terminals in the U.S., and processed over 2.5 billion transactions in 2000. They rank second in the U.S. in private label credit services with nearly 72 million card holders, representing 49 private label programs. They are also the largest card processor to the petroleum industry. By combining transaction services, credit services and marketing services, Alliance Data Systems assists their clients in increasing sales, building loyalty and profitability, and supporting them in their daily business critical operations. Since mid 2000, ADS has used M2 Systems' ENGIN product to enable efficient transaction brokering for credit card authorization and other related business processes for numerous retailers. ENGIN provides the translation and routing of request-response messages between point-of-sale terminals, internal ADS systems and credit card authorizers. ENGIN also provides TCP/IP and SNA LU6.2 communication services over the ADS network. The solution consists of four dual-processor IBM RISC/6000s running AIX 4.3. Each cluster is connected to the other three via TCP/IP pipes, allowing automatic re-routing of messages in the event that any of the TCP/IP or SNA LU6.2 connections are broken. ENGIN provides translation, routing and request-response correlation for both proprietary and ISO bitmap message formats. The ADS ENGIN solution is processing up to 500 transactions per second.