NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ACI Worldwide (Nasdaq:ACIW),
a leading international provider of payment systems, today announced
that the national ATM / POS switch at the Central Bank of Oman (CBO)
has gone live, running BASE24-eps(R) -- ACI's market-leading payments
engine. This go-live is the culmination of Oman's national payment
system, first launched in 2003, and gives the country a solid
technological foundation for future e-payments initiatives.

Creating Oman's national switch has been a major project for the
Central Bank of Oman, which involved consolidating two
previously-independent switches, as well as ensuring all financial
institutions in the country can communicate with and send and receive
transactions from the central switch. The CBO used ACI Simulation
Services for Enterprise Testing(TM) (ASSET) for the testing and
certification of all the country's financial institutions to ensure
they can interact with the central switch.

Now that the switch is live, it is expected to handle monthly volumes
of approximately 5 million ATM and POS transactions, and it can handle
transactions from EMV and non-EMV cards. The project will, for the
first time, give Oman the ability to link directly with all the GCC Net
switches, of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, instead of a
single link through the member country switches. This means ATM
transactions can be routed directly between GCC countries without going
out to the wider card networks.

A senior officer from the CBO said, "For a project as critical to our
national infrastructure as a new national switch, it was essential we
worked with suppliers we could trust, who had proven, scalable and
reliable technology that we knew could meet our current and future
demands. A consortium comprising ACI, HP and IMTAC worked together,
alongside the team at CBO and from member banks, to ensure this project
was successful, and we could go live with confidence."

Ralph Dangelmaier, president, global markets and services at ACI
Worldwide, said, "I am delighted that this project is live and Oman can
start to benefit from this new technology. BASE24-eps gives the country
a solid platform for future development of e-payment services, and
features such as its multi-currency and multi-institution support are
already being embraced by CBO. This project has been delivered
successfully as a partnership between CBO, ACI, HP and IMTAC."

For more information about BASE24-eps please visit
www.aciworldwide.com/BASE24-eps. For more information on ASSET please
visit www.aciworldwide.com/ASSET.

About ACI Worldwide

ACI Worldwide powers electronic payments for more than 750 financial
institutions, retailers and processors around the world. The company
has the broadest, most integrated suite of electronic payment software
in the market. More than 75 billion times each year, ACI's solutions
process consumer payments. On an average day, ACI software manages more
than US$12 trillion in wholesale payments. And for more than 150
organizations worldwide, ACI software helps to protect their customers
from financial crime. To learn more about ACI and understand why we are
trusted globally, please visit www.aciworldwide.com. You can also find
us on www.paymentsinsights.com or on Twitter @ACI_Worldwide.


CONTACT:  Catherine Eyres
          ACI Worldwide
          +44 1923 812741
          Catherine.Eyres@aciworldwide.com