Our client is a division of a large international trade association for institutions that deliver payment services to customers, ensuring that all payments are secure and reliable. The division is responsible for the bulk clearing of cheques and paper credits, totaling over 5 million cheques each day.

A project was initiated in 2005 to simplify the infrastructure and reduce costs within the cheque clearing process, replacing an existing application and infrastructure. The resulting application now manages all the electronic clearing data related to paper cheques and credits. The information flows amongst the member banks during an end-of-day processing window resulting in a financial settlement to each bank the following morning.

Our client needed a solution that offered predictable costs throughout the seven-year anticipated lifespan of the application. The desired solution consisted of four components: a private network provider, a certificate authority, software to enable secure transfer, and software that could provide persistent authentication and digital encryption capabilities.

The technical committee overseeing the project evaluated 20 companies that offered mainly “hub and spoke” solutions that imposed the same costs and complexity of the current application. PKWARE was the only company to advise the project team that they could continue to use their existing infrastructure for the first three elements and gain the benefits of direct member-to-member data exchange if they implemented data security using SecureZIP.

SecureZIP was able to efficiently manage the disparate computing environments used by member banks (mainframes, as well as Windows and UNIX servers) and helped the division overcome future cost concerns by providing an option that allowed the member banks to change their computing environments without impacting the overall cost of the solution.