Accenture and SAP Payment Platform Excels in Performance Benchmark

BOSTON, Oct. 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- To help banks lower the overall cost of payment processing and comply with SEPA regulation, Accenture and SAP today announced that SAP Payment Engine, the payment operations platform co-developed by SAP and Accenture, has successfully passed a performance benchmark test. The test showed that the platform can process half the trading volume of Europe's largest payment market in less than five-and-a-half hours. The announcement was made at Sibos, the world's premier financial services event, being held in Boston, October 1-5.

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The test covered the end-to-end payment process, including payment receipt, authorization, upload, validation, limit check, routing, payment clearing, bulking of outgoing payments and real-time posting of resulting booking entries such as customer account, clearing account and suspense account entries.

The performance benchmark, which used a production transaction mix of an actual tier 1 retail bank, indicated a processing throughput of 55.9 million payment transactions in five hours and 21 minutes, with an average of 173,870 transactions per minute. The total volume of the German market, the largest payment market in Europe, is approximately 110 million transactions per day.

"To meet the requirements of the Single Euro Payments Area regulation, banks need a payment solution capable of quickly processing large transaction volumes from various sources across the enterprise," said Eckehard Stolz, a senior executive in Accenture's Financial Services practice. "The performance benchmark confirmed our belief that SAP Payment Engine can handle the growing transaction volumes expected from the SEPA regulation and serve as the central hub of all payment activities, enabling banks to create a common, cross-enterprise payment IT infrastructure necessary for SEPA."

"Because it is scalable and flexible, SAP Payment Engine was developed to help banks achieve significant cost savings, improved service and operational efficiency," said Marc Derungs, vice president banking, SAP AG. "And because SAP Payment Engine is multibank- and multichannel-enabled, it supports insourcing business models that allow banks and service providers to offer payment processing to various in-house entities and also offer white-labeled services to other banks, bringing additional volume to the hub."

The goal of the performance benchmark was to verify the scalability and the overall throughput of SAP Payment Engine in a production-sized environment. The benchmark was based on middleware server and was sized to meet the requirements of a large IT center of a tier 1 retail bank.

About SAP Payment Engine

SAP Payment Engine, designed and built with the support of Accenture, offers a single payment operations platform to streamline all payment processes across a bank and standardizes interfaces to surrounding applications to allow the creation of a central payments hub. SAP Payment Engine is multibank- and multichannel-enabled, supporting in-sourcing business models that allow banks and service providers to offer payment processing to various in-house entities as well as white-labeled services to other banks, bringing additional volume and revenue sources onto the hub. It helps banks achieve significant cost savings, improved quality of service and operational efficiency.

The SAP Payment Engine application is based on SAP NetWeaver(R), which unifies technology components into a single platform. SAP NetWeaver is compatible with banks' existing IT infrastructure, enabling banks to manage change while minimizing custom integration. The platform is based on industry standards and can be integrated with commonly used development tools such as Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE); Microsoft .NET; and IBM WebSphere.

SAP shipped release 2.30 of SAP Payment Engine in August 2007. The focus of this latest release is to assist with compliance of current SEPA requirements.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills and technologies to help clients improve their performance. With approximately 170,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US $19.70 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2007. Its home page is http://www.accenture.com/.

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software*. More than 41,200 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP(R) applications-from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver(R) platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at )

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.

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