London and New York, 11th March, 2008, - ACE Software Solutions (ACE) (www.acesw.com), provider of intelligent payment, AML and STP solutions for the financial sector, today announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with ACI Worldwide, a leading international provider of software for electronic payment systems. The partnership, aimed primarily at the North American market, will address OFAC compliance and builds on the success of the four year old relationship between the two companies based around ACE’s STP Toolkit.

Under the terms of the agreement, ACI will distribute ACE’s OFAC Guard product for message filtering. It allows organisations to compare and filter their transactions against various watchlists from national governments and other authorities. The solution provides a low rate of false positives and ensures financial organisations are able to effectively comply with the most stringent regulations and compliance standards, and focus resources on the most suspicious, high priority transactions.

“ACI has an established client base, proven sector expertise and complementary solutions to ACE. The combination of OFAC Guard from ACE with the ACI Money Transfer System™ provides an unbeatable solution to payments and OFAC compliance needs. It ensures that clients can maintain the highest STP rates secure in the knowledge that compliance and message filtering are being performed to the most exacting of standards,” comments ACE Software Solutions CEO Parth Desai.

OFAC Guard features XML-based integration with the ACI Money Transfer System, solving the need for message filtering allied to efficient payment processing. The combined solution is available on a variety of deployment platforms and has been praised for ease of use. OFAC Guard uses the same artificial intelligence techniques as the ACE STP Toolkit to reduce false positives and increase STP.

“Comprehensive filtering of financial messages to meet worldwide compliance standards continues to be a challenge for the industry as a whole. We have seen greater demand in the market for effective OFAC processing solutions, so we turned to ACE again. Their reputation and global client base of AML customers demonstrates their expertise in this market,” said Jonathan Eber, director of product management at ACI Worldwide. “Through joint planning, development and testing, we ensure our clients can take full advantage of the latest innovations resulting from our strategic partnerships.”