Alaric International predicts the payment switch will play a much greater role in the entire consumer shopping experience.

The proliferation of social media, social networking and social commerce continued to accelerate towards the end of 2011. Alaric International, a leading global supplier of advanced technology payments products and services, today urges merchants, large and small alike, to embrace the many opportunities these new media channels bring.

For years mobile internet solutions have been hampered by communication bandwidth and device technology challenges. With next generation smart phones pervasive high band capabilities the previous boundaries have evaporated, leading to the opportunity of bringing full Internet level experience to the high street via mobile phones.

Sophisticated mobile applications and reliable mobile internet access mean the concept of “multi-channel” has now become “omni-channel”. Retailers will be need to incorporate an increased diversity of interfaces to enable mobile online consumers to buy, pay and receive goods and services on their terms, from whatever medium or payments channel is at their fingertips.

Steve Whiting, Business Development Director at Alaric International, says “The overall fees for payment transaction authorisations will be pushed down to virtually zero, yet the overall value of the payments infrastructure will increase. This value is in the increased foot-fall, better customer experience and greater service levels that will drive stronger user interaction and a more engaged and loyal customer base.”

Retailers, processors, service providers and banks will require immense scalability, real time instant availability, security, cryptography, reliability, flexibility, configurability, and ultra-high performance products to deliver real world social commerce in a truly integrated payments ecosystem.

Steve continues, “For years retailers have seen payments solutions as a necessary evil. Expensive investments that have been mandated for ‘Chip and PIN’ and PCI compliance have done little if anything to increase sales. However the same retailers will now begin to see a return on their investments that is directly proportional to the sophistication of their payment switch solutions. The payment switch is no longer just about paying, it is now right at the core of the buying and selling cycle.”

Payment vendors that already have this technology will go into the coming year with the edge over their competitors, those that do not will be under pressure to catch up.

The era of social commerce is upon us. The key to success for retailers in 2012, in addition to the security and reliability of its payments switch, will be the flexibility to allow any and all customers to interact with them across all available channels.

About Alaric

Headquartered in London, with international offices in Malaysia, Australia and the U.S., Alaric is a leading supplier of advanced technology payments products and services. Alaric offers solutions for both SOA-based and conventional multi-channel payments integration, card authorization, switching and routing, enterprise wide fraud detection and card fraud detection.
Alaric’s products are fully platform independent and scalable to meet the needs of the largest financial institution, service provider or retailer. Used in combination, Alaric’s Authentic and Fractals products represent the highest performance payment switching and fraud solution available on the market.
Authentic is a modern ultra-high performance EFT authorisation and routing system. Achieving in excess of ten thousand transactions per second in recent benchmark tests, Authentic is highly configurable with innovative market leading functionality with five nines fault tolerance.
Fractals enables a unique multi-institution, multi-lingual approach to enterprise fraud detection, allowing financial institutions, processors and retailers across the globe to deploy a holistic fraud management solution at an enterprise level. It is a single, integrated solution for issuer and acquirer fraud detection, providing economies of scale in hardware, database licences, staffing and training.
For further information please visit: www.alaric.com

For more information please contact;

SkyParlour
Kimberley Waldron
Tel: 0161 817 8709
Email: [email protected]