Modernizing payments with ACI and IBM to strengthen resilience and meet rising customer expectations

A long‑term partnership driving continuous banking payments modernization

A leading Dutch bank, and one of Kyndryl’s key partners in Europe, has relied on ACI to power its mission‑critical payments environment for more than 40 years. Over this long‑standing partnership, the bank has continually evolved its systems to keep pace with rising customer expectations, regulatory demands, and the fast-changing payments landscape.
This commitment to innovation set the stage for its latest transformation, upgrading its retail and card payment systems with BASE24-eps, ACI Worldwide’s enterprise-class payments solution designed to manage a constant flow of new transactions, channels and technologies, deployed on IBM Z infrastructure. By moving from its legacy HPE NonStop servers to IBM Z, the bank now processes payments on a secure, reliable platform built to keep services running smoothly. This modern approach helps the bank deliver consistent value to its customers, backed by resilient technology that’s ready for the future.

The challenge:
Addressing legacy constraints and critical skills gaps

The Dutch bank previously used ACI’s BASE24 classic product on a dual HP NonStop Kernel (HPNSK) system to process payment transactions from various sources. Although the HPNSK infrastructure was designed for 100% service availability, the bank was experiencing skills gaps and needed a more future-proof, compliant infrastructure for its payment processing.

• Skills gaps in maintaining the HPNSK environment supporting the existing payments solution
• Need for a more future‑proof, compliant infrastructure

The solution:
Modernizing the core payments platform

The Dutch bank adopted ACI’s BASE24-eps as its central payment system, handling all retail and card transactions in one place. With IT teams focused on standardization, IBM Z stood out as the right platform to support BASE24-eps, meeting both cost goals and sustainability commitments.
This shift ensures the bank’s payment systems are set up for the future, with the resilience and control today’s customers expect.

The Dutch bank’s system z BASE24-eps design is based on the “Single Site Parallel Sysplex—Metro Mirror with Hyperswap” architecture. The “Single Site” is, in fact, a shared twin data center on the Sysplex distance.

• ACI’s BASE24‑eps centralizes all retail and card payments on a resilient, future‑ready platform supported by the IBM Z infrastructure

The results:
Delivering resilient, scalable payment operations

• Stronger operational resilience and uptime
  The expected mean time between failure is better than once every five years, with a recovery time objective of less than four hours, delivering 99.999% availability over five years.* This ensures consistent 24x7x365 service availability to clients.
• Scalability
  Future volume growth—including peak‑season loads, national payment‑scheme surges—can be absorbed without needing new infrastructure.
• Governance and resilience
  Running payments on the ACI platform with IBM Z gives the bank sovereign control, regulatory alignment, and resilience without relying on public cloud.

Boosting financial recovery and efficiency with ACI

Rabobank’s adoption of ACI Automated Dispute Manager has delivered substantial improvements across its dispute management operation resulting in faster resolutions, higher chargeback recovery rates, increased productivity, and lower costs.

This success clearly demonstrates the value of automation in strengthening financial performance, reducing operational risk, and enhancing customer experience.

Looking ahead

The bank has upgraded to IBM z17, and the ACI application is planned for testing and modernization to ensure full compliance with card and Dutch banking schemes during 2026. Kyndryl continues to provide operations and service‑level support across infrastructure and networking, ensuring a resilient and efficiently operated service.

As these upgrades progress, ACI and the IBM Ecosystem will continue collaborating with the bank to deliver practical enhancements that further strengthen its payments environment.

*ACI internal data

About ACI’s BASE24-eps

BASE24-eps is a comprehensive solution for acquiring, authenticating, routing, switching, and authorizing card- and non-card-based financial transactions through various channels. It is a fault-tolerant software architecture that runs on multiple platforms, high-volume processing with the highest availability.

Find out more: Manage multichannel transactions with BASE24-eps

ACI and IBM Partnership

IBM and ACI have partnered since the mid-1980s to provide financial institutions with highly reliable and full-function applications for transaction processing, transaction settlement, and card management applications. ACI’s payment solutions are deployed on the IBM Z mainframe and also on IBM Power installations globally

Find out more: IBM | ACI Worldwide