APACS, the trade association for 97% of all UK payments, will implement an enterprise identity management solution to synchronise 3,500 key financial contacts.

ANS, an independent UK Information Technology solutions provider, announces today a contract win to implement an enterprise Identity Management project valued at a significant amount, for APACS, the UK payments association.

APACS provides a forum for its members to come together on non-competitive issues to bring about change and develop banking systems for the future. They currently have 28 members, including major global and high street banks and credit card issuers; in total these members account for 97% of all payment traffic in the UK.

Currently, APACS spends four days per week managing user information for its 3,500 members and affiliates within three disparate IT systems. The APACS Contact Database ("ACD") is a bespoke application using its own Oracle database. An online contact system, Livelink, contains a copy of a subset of the data held within the ACD, and its email system contains another separate copy of contact information. The majority of this time spent, inputting the information three times, could be avoided.

ANS proposed a solution to integrate these systems through a single Identity Vault. Storing all the information in one central place, authoritative user data for specific groups will be automatically synchronised back to each of the three systems, resulting in a single view of accurate and up-to-date information. This new electronic process will reduce the management time to less than a day a week.

As an added component, the Identity Management solution will securely delegate out the responsibility of updating user attributes to each member and affiliate, synchronising those changes back to the central Identity Vault. With user self-service, it also provides the ability for an individual to reset a forgotten password.

The project, which commences this week and will take just over 2 months to deliver, will provide the first phase in a scalable provisioning solution for its 3,500 user identities within the APACS community and the 140 APACS internal network users. Future system integrations are likely to include HR, the telephone PBX system, token ID authentication and single sign-on.