"... On top of that infrastructure solution we are also trying to build business solutions; we do that a little bit differently than we do with infrastructure .... we do that by picking partners, and so when it was time for us to pick a partner - because we want to build an electronic check clearing solution -we began looking for that partner.
Now the criteria was something that is pretty standard; we needed somebody that is best in class, we needed somebody who is modern and open and can support all of our platforms, we needed a product that is scaleable and can handle very large volumes of transactions, we needed a product that is reliable, because as you know we need to have those kind of safeguards and those kind of abilities for payment system to carefully run this thing on an international basis.
So we looked around the world, we knew that there is a lot of other things happening in the world; in the US there was a thing called Check 21. US is one of the largest consumers of checks today, and check products, and now we are moving into image-based solutions for the US and we needed a partner that can scale up and do that.
We looked in a lot of US companies but at the end we picked as our main partner ProgressSoft because they offered that type of solution to us, that met all our criteria. Of course I first met this company when I was attending the SWIFT conference - the end of SWIFT conference in last October in Atlanta and like a lot of people, I was asking myself: What's going on in Jordan? Do they have a software industry in Jordan? I was asking those kind of questions and I come to learn over the last 6 months working with ProgressSoft: Yes there is a software company in Jordan and they deliver a great product.
We learned about the superb and pioneer country-wide solution in Qatar. We examined the solution there, listened to banks and it's really a privilege now to have ProgressSoft as a partner and we go to the market and sell around the world for ProgressSoft not just in the Middle East but also all of Europe as well as American Nations.
So it's with a great deal of surprise that I was invited to come here and speak tonight and to describe the story of the journey that I went through learning about ProgressSoft.