Central Bank of Oman Selects ACI Base24-eps for National Switch
Central Bank of Oman (CBO) has selected ACI Worldwide’s Base24-eps as the foundation for the new national switch in Oman.
The CBO has also selected ACI Simulation Services for Enterprise Testing (ASSET), which will be used by the bank internally for testing, as well as by the national switch member banks for the certification process with CBO. Base24-eps will be the retail payments engine for the debit processing platform, providing intelligent transaction authentication, authorisation and routing capabilities.
The project involves consolidating the previous two independent switches into one central solution under the ownership of the CBO and migrating all financial institutions onto the common platform. It will be processing volumes of approximately five million ATM and point-of-sale (POS) transactions per month. The new system will be able to handle EMV transactions, and the project includes a national roll-out of EMV technology for all financial institutions in Oman.
A senior spokesperson from CBO said: “This is a significant investment in the infrastructure of Oman, and we wanted to invest in the best technologies in the market to deliver a future-proof system. It needed to provide multi-currency and multi-institution support, as well as the essential real-time message switching for authorisation and international network connections. The state of the art Base24-eps has shown it is capable of supporting the very largest systems, and was the obvious choice for a project of this importance.”
ACI will be delivering the project, with support from HP, the prime contractor for the services, along with Industrial Management Technology and Contracting (IMTAC) as a local partner.