London and New York – 4th June 2007, - ACE Software Solutions (www.acesw.com), provider of intelligent payment and STP solutions for the financial sector, today announced that for a limited period of time, it will be making access to the ACE BIC IBAN module free of charge to qualifying companies in order to further industry movement towards SEPA compliance and introduce greater STP for European cross border payments.

“We have seen a significant amount of interest in our BIC IBAN solutions and have chosen to launch this free offer at the EBAday exhibition where the industry is coming together to focus on improving European payments processing. The problems caused by failing to automatically process European cross border payments result in unnecessary bottlenecks. We decided to make the product available free of charge as we wanted to make it easy for institutions to take the initiative in removing this barrier to STP which will thus benefit the industry as a whole,” said ACE Software Solutions CEO Parth Desai.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has mandated that all European cross-border payments must have the Beneficiary Account Number specified in valid IBAN format and the Beneficiary Bank/Branch identified with a valid Bank Identifier Code (BIC). All institutions need to be capable of capturing, recognizing, validating and processing IBAN. Failure to do so will lead to additional processing costs related to rejected payments and an impact on customer service and reputation.

The ACE BIC IBAN module can be implemented as a standalone product. This unique offer will enable qualifying financial institutions to significantly improve their European cross border payment processing capability.

“The ACE BIC IBAN module is a valuable tool that will help organisations eliminate a key obstacle to full SEPA compliance. It will be of particular interest now as institutions gear up to processing higher numbers of Euro-domestic transactions. Enabling higher rates of STP for these transactions will be critical to an institutions’ ability to keep costs down and to remain competitive,” concluded Desai.

The ACE BIC IBAN module ensures that you can process all cross border payments with mandatory BIC and IBAN information, automatically validating and repairing messages irrespective of format. ACE doesn’t just recognize the problem it solves it by using intelligent IBAN and BIC detection, validation and automatic BIC derivation for full SEPA compliance.