London, England – May 12, 2010 - Alaric International, a leading supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry, today announced that Kuwait Finance House (KFH), one of the world's leading Islamic financial institutions, has gone live with a deployment of Alaric’s ‘Authentic’ payments platform. The project was implemented with the local support of 3SC Technologies, Alaric International’s regional partner in the Middle East.
In a key technology refresh, Kuwait Finance House selected Authentic as a replacement integration layer to manage the bank’s entire channel banking payments traffic between its legacy switching system and the back office. The project marks the first step in KFH’s wider initiative to streamline their payments infrastructure.
The Authentic platform has been deployed in a virtualised environment with multiple replicated blade servers operating in a fail-safe ‘active-active’ configuration. “The introduction of Authentic has brought us safety and stability where we most needed it without incurring a significant platform cost,” explains Dr. Waleed Al-Hasawi, KFH’s Assistant General Manager of IT. He continues: “Peak performance constraints are no longer a cause for concern. The inherent scalability of the solution and the resilience of the deployment was proven to us during the course of this project.”
"From the start we were hugely impressed with the flexibility of the Authentic software,” comments Hamida El-Mehadji, Systems Manager at KFH. “Being able to quickly configure business logic to extend the application independently was a key factor in our decision to select Authentic. KFH is now able to approach new payment integrations as straightforward internal projects; we no longer need to factor in a dependence on vendor-led development.”
Following hot on the heels of the recent global alliance announced with Oracle, the successful KFH project has marked an important milestone for Alaric International in the Middle East. “Kuwait Finance House is highly regarded in the region for taking bold technology steps. We are delighted that a bank of this standing has joined our growing list of clients,” says Paul Griffin, Alaric’s Regional Director for the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions. “All our clients firmly believe that the future for mission-critical payments applications lies with an open, standards-based approach to technology. It’s great to see forward-thinking banks such as Kuwait Finance House join the changing tide of opinion and insist on removing the traditional ‘vendor lock-in’ from their payments infrastructure.”
For more information about Alaric’s ‘Authentic’ payments platform, please visit:
http://www.alaric.com/authentic.html- ends -
About Alaric International
Headquartered in London and with international offices in the US, Malaysia and Australia, Alaric is a leading supplier of advanced technology payments-based products and services. Alaric provides financial institutions with high performance payments authorisation and switching, payments integration and fraud detection solutions.
Alaric’s products, representing the next generation of payments systems, are truly open, reliable, scalable and highly configurable without sacrificing performance. They are designed to empower customers and remove the ‘platform lock-in’ so prevalent with the legacy systems banks are now looking to replace. Alaric’s products are written in Java and, as a result, can be deployed on a wide range of hardware platforms and operating systems.
For further information, please visit us at
http://www.alaric.comPress contact:
Nicky Denovan
EvokedSet PR for Alaric International
Tel: +44 (0)7747 017654
Email: alaric[at]evokedset[dot]com
Distributed on behalf of EvokedSet Ltd by NeonDrum (
http://www.neondrum.com)
Nicky Denovan
Tel: +44 7747 017654
nicky[at]neondrum[dot]com
