London and New York, 13th March 2007 - ACE Software Solutions (www.acesw.com), provider of intelligent payment and STP solutions for the financial sector, today announced the availability of specific industry based solutions of its PELICAN product suite, alongside other complementary standalone modules and toolkits, providing comprehensive solutions for payments, STP, SWIFT connectivity and SEPA compliance needs.

Following a number of changes in the financial and payments landscape, including new regulations, increased focus on compliance, continued drive to reduce costs and increase STP, and ongoing initiatives by SWIFT, ACE has repackaged its various offerings to more clearly address what business issues the institutions are facing and what type of problem they are solving.

ACE’s PELICAN framework - based on SWIFTReady Gold accredited technologies, is now the core technology for the three new solutions, specifically designed to address the market needs of different customer groups. These are PELICAN for SEPA, PELICAN for Corporates and PELICAN for SWIFTNet.

Despite widespread awareness of the introduction of SEPA in less than 10 months, it is believed that many institutions have yet to fully tackle this critical change to the payments infrastructure. Therefore ACE created PELICAN for SEPA, a cost effective, low risk solution aimed at solving the pain of technical and functional SEPA compliance – for SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) and SEPA Direct Debit (SDD) for financial institutions. This can be achieved without modifying other internal systems thus guaranteeing a rapid, low risk implementation.

With SWIFT targeting the corporates market, there is a need for corporates to take control of their own payments and this is made possible by PELICAN for Corporates. It enables corporates to centralise payments onto a single integrated platform, whilst taking advantage of SWIFT access via corporates to bank access models, Score (Standardised CORporate Environment) or MA-CUG (Member Administered Closed User Group). It helps corporates to manage and control all payments and cashflow in real time whilst taking care of any connectivity issues with SWIFT and other corporates.

PELICAN for SWIFTNet enables financial institutions to centralise and manage all SWIFT FIN and XML messages and connects to SWIFT SAA and SAG via several interfaces. It can capture, repair, enrich, route and reformat SWIFT messages and manage all connections and messages.

In addition to these three solutions, there are two complementary solutions available from ACE that addresses critical payments and compliance issues. These are ACE AML Toolkit and ACE BIC IBAN module, each of which can be implemented in a stand alone manner or seamlessly integrated with other parts of the PELICAN solution. ACE AML is a suite of products that allows you to effectively manage Anti-Money Laundering, fraud and compliance message filtering, whilst ACE BIC IBAN allows institutions to validate and repair all cross-border payment messages, irrespective of the format.

“The pace of change in the financial industry is increasing. New initiatives by regulatory bodies and SWIFT have created a set of market conditions that pose significant payment processing challenges and opportunities to financial institutions and corporates. In order to make our offering more easily understood, ACE has defined each of our solutions to match a clear need – SEPA, SWIFT connectivity and message management and routing,” said ACE Software CEO Parth Desai.

Each element of the PELICAN solution suite solves a current pressing need in the market whilst providing a platform that can accommodate changes in the payments landscape, whether from industry or regulatory initiatives.

“We have listened carefully to our customers and a common issue is that companies are looking for solutions that can be implemented quickly. Each of the ACE solutions has been designed accordingly, poses low project risk and generates rapid benefits whilst providing the flexibility to cope with any future change in circumstances,” Desai concludes.