VocaLink Selects IONA Artix Data Services to Support Euro Payment Services

IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a world leader in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, today announced that VocaLink, the transactions specialist, has selected IONA Artix™ Data Services as a component of VocaLink’s Euro Payment Service for its pan-European and global customers. VocaLink provides its customers with the facility to translate legacy format payments into a SEPA compliant format, using Artix Data Services, minimizing the impact of SEPA compliance for customers. Artix Data Services will help VocaLink to offer banks a set of cost effective payments modernization solutions to support legacy payments standards and the new SEPA standards. The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) which came into effect on 28 January harmonized the payment systems between countries in Europe, to make payments across national boundaries as easy as payments within those borders. During the SEPA migration phase the banking industry has to support existing legacy domestic payment message types, new SEPA message types and SWIFT message types for international transactions. Nick Masterson-Jones, Director of IT at VocaLink said: "Our customers in the global banking community require a payments processing service that can help them reduce the complexity and cost of compliance with new SEPA standards while at the same time supporting existing payment standards for domestic and international transactions.” Masterson-Jones continues, "We evaluated a number of options on the market and selected IONA’s Artix Data Services as a key part of our technology stack having been impressed with the depth of the product and the support offered. Artix provides us with a fast and cost effective solution as part of our message reformatting service.” Artix is IONA’s advanced SOA infrastructure suite which offers an alternative to the proprietary and centralized based approach of other integration vendors. Artix Data Services is an open and standards-based development tool for model-driven data integration. Pre-built standards libraries provide the broadest support for financial services standards, message types and validation rules, including SWIFT, SEPA, FpML, TWIST, ISO 20022, CREST and FIX, with the ability to model and specialize any data format for complete compliance. By providing a data modeling and semantic validation product with pre-built data models, customers can reduce development time and costs associated with maintaining multiple financial messaging standards. "Migration to SEPA is probably the single biggest challenge and opportunity facing financial institutions operating within the Eurozone area,” said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA Technologies. "The challenge of supporting multiple legacy and new payment processing standards without compromising performance or incurring additional internal development costs is significant. Customers such as VocaLink need solutions that not only offer the broadest support for industry standards, optimum performance but also reliable solutions that reduce risk exposure in financial markets. We’re pleased to be recognized by VocaLink as a leader in this area and look forward to supporting their customers to meet their SEPA compliance requirements.” About IONA For more than a decade, IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a world leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for Global 2000 IT environments. IONA pioneered standards-based integration with its CORBA-based Orbix® products. IONA's Artix™, an advanced SOA infrastructure suite enables customers to leverage service-oriented architecture to streamline and modernize IT environments. The FUSE™ family of open source distributed SOA infrastructure products allows customers to take advantage of the economic benefits associated with the use of open source software. IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA, visit our Web site at http://www.iona.com. About VocaLink VocaLink is a specialist provider of transaction services to banks, their corporate customers and Government departments. It processes domestic and international automated payments and provides ATM switching solutions. On a peak day, the VocaLink automated payment platform processes over 90 million transactions and over half a billion in a month. Its switching platform connects the world’s busiest ATM network of over 60,000 ATMs. Having pioneered electronic payments for over four decades, many of the world’s top banks and their corporate customers rely on VocaLink to meet their transaction needs. VocaLink’s processing services offer banks reach throughout the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and beyond; and are augmented by value-added services that leverage industry expertise and technical capabilities Please visit www.vocalink.com for more information.