Part of the ACI Enterprise Payments Platform, ACI Payments Monitoring powered by IR Transact gives banks and financial institutions visibility into the health of their systems and status of payments in real time — covering high-value and low-value real-time payments, as well as card payments. The announcement of full enterprise monitoring capabilities follows more than two decades of successful partnership between ACI and IR. "Our global customers are seeking new levels of insight and real-time analysis to help them adapt to changing consumer behaviors,” said Sam Jawad, head of Banks & Intermediaries, ACI Worldwide. “By extending our long-standing and successful partnership with IR, we have also further enriched our real-time analytical capabilities, delivering comprehensive and actionable business insights.” The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the trend towards real-time payments around the world. ACI Worldwide’s 2022 Prime Time for Real-Time global payments report forecasts that real-time payments transaction volume will rise from 118.3 billion in 2021 to reach 427.7 billion annually by 2026. As governments and central banks enable the shift towards real-time payments to unlock economic growth, they are providing further impetus for cashless and real-time digital payments. The real-time monitoring capabilities that ACI and IR provide positions banks to respond to this change. “The continuing shift towards cashless payments, the emergence of new payment schemes and growing customer expectations are all putting pressure on organizations to deliver a seamless payments experience,” said David Guiver, Head of Transact and Infrastructure Products, IR. “Through our expanded partnership with ACI, banks and financial institutions benefit from real-time monitoring that helps them glean actionable insights on a single pane of glass. This enables them to continuously optimize their services and resolve issues before they impact customers.” Customers benefit from end-to-end visibility of their payment systems and are able to monitor their payment engines more efficiently. The partnership aims to further utilize payment analytics to help businesses take decisions backed-up by data.