Japan's Largest Credit Card Processor Selects Kabira Financial Payment Suite to Drive New Payment Channel Strategy.

Kabira's Solution Selected as Ideal Platform for Transaction Volume Growth, Speed of New Service Delivery, and Lowest TCO 

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Kabira Technologies Inc. today announced that NTT Data has successfully deployed Kabira Transaction Platform[TM] and Kabira Financial Payment Switch[TM] in its payment transaction business unit, CAFIS (Credit and Finance Information System). The system is expected to address NTT Data's current and future e-payment transaction processing needs.

Japan's largest card payment processor, CAFIS currently handles 2.4 billion transactions annually, with transaction volume increasing by approximately 20% year over year. To maintain its competitive advantage NTT Data will innovate in current markets, as well as branch out to new markets such as China. To drive innovation, NTT Data is adapting to new consumer payment preferences, such as small-amount (micro) payments, credit payments, pre-pay/post-pay, and Internet payments. With future growth in mind, NTT Data also wanted to be able to respond faster to these service demands while cutting the cost of processing each payment.

After considering other solutions, as well as internal development options, NTT Data concluded Kabira Financial Payment Switch was the best choice for their new payment infrastructure because of its ability to meet the growing and changing needs of the card processing market. The new solution has helped enable NTT Data's expansion strategy as well. NTT Data is using Kabira Financial Payment Switch to provide cross-border merchant customers with low-cost access to the proprietary CAFIS card processing system.

"Kabira Financial Payment Switch is a very flexible and extensible platform that allows CAFIS to make rapid changes to our existing systems and to extend functionality to meet our specific needs and business conditions and strategies change," said Masanori Kurihara, Deputy Manager of the Card Payment Group, NTT Data CAFIS' Cards and Payment Transaction Business Unit. "We selected Kabira because it provides CAFIS the best of both worlds, security with a high level of reliability and lower cost to help achieve higher profit margins."

A key element driving NTT Data's selection of Kabira Financial Payment Switch is the ability to run the new system on a small number of commodity servers while still achieving superior scalability and highly reliable fault-tolerance, a result previously achievable only by proprietary mainframe systems. Competitive solutions can fail when they hit scalability ceilings and when adding additional hardware is no longer an option.

"Consumers are speaking loud and clear and driving the credit card industry in new directions. The payments industry has quickly evolved into a battle over services, and the winners will be those companies that can develop and deliver innovative new services quickly. Additionally, card companies must find a way to reduce the cost per transaction, particularly in light of the rapid growth of micro-payments," said Bradley Rode, Chief Operating Officer of Kabira. "With its new channel and service strategy, NTT Data has demonstrated its leadership and industry innovation. Working with Kabira, NTT Data has built a flexible and scalable foundation to deliver on the demands of its new markets and to secure its profit goals."

Kabira Financial Payment Switch is a configurable payment processing software solution for the card industry - including card processors, associations, acquirers, and issuers - designed to achieve superior scalability on fewer commodity servers, higher reliability and to realize lower costs per transaction than any other industry solution. Leveraging the proven Kabira Transaction Platform[TM], Kabira Financial Payment Switch is designed to enable uniquely faster development for faster time-to-market and bring high availability and fault-tolerance at the application level, a result previously achievable only by expensive hardware systems with proprietary architecture.

About Kabira Technologies Inc.

Kabira provides high performance transaction processing software for global enterprises to manage high volumes at a substantially lower cost. Kabira's software is designed to ensure critical business services are always available, and new services can be implemented more quickly at five times the performance and a fraction of the cost of traditional transaction processing systems. Kabira's technology has been adopted by 100 organizations in 30 countries. Companies such as Visa, AT&T, France Telecom, Bank of America, Vodafone and Alcatel rely on Kabira's high-performance transaction processing to support real-time product and service offerings. The company is privately held. For more information, visit www.kabira.com.