Australian-based financial software company Distra has spent the week at the Sibos banking conference in Toronto showing off what CEO Mike Aston believes could prove to be a pragmatic solution to banks' mobile payments problems. Distra is working with Cisco on a system the firm has dubbed the Universal Payments Platform.Last month, BPay pulled the plug on the Mambo initiative, after NAB, ANZ and Westpac withdrew their support for the programme that had been conceived as an attempt to create a single mobile payments platform for Australia.  While he was disappointed at the collapse of Mambo, Aston signalled that he wasn't surprised. "In Australia, the banks are growing at different speeds, which is a problem. If you are doing something that requires everyone to be on the same page at the same time it's really hard."National Australia Bank uses Distra's payment capability in its white-label processing business, Evolution Payments.Although, in the absence of Mambo, there is no clear alternative regarding a unified approach to mobile payments, Aston believes the banks can't afford to wait long. To remain competitive, they will need to start offering mobile payments services, perhaps even ahead of a standard being settled.Working with Cisco, Distra recently demonstrated how its system can be loaded on to a Cisco UCS and still deal with high-transaction volumes. Aston said a major US financial services company had wanted to see what throughput was possible using the arrangement, to, in part, help allay concerns that virtual environments have limitations when it comes to transaction throughput.According to the company, the trials showed the system was able to comfortably handle transaction processing rates of 3000 transactions a second, with a message latency of less than 150 milliseconds.  It claims the system can handle peak loads of up to 4500 transactions a second."We are providing a mission critical platform for transaction processing," said Aston.He describes the Distra/Cisco solution as having potential to be "the building blocks of what would be the mobile payments network."What Distra and Cisco are hoping is that banks will consider installing what amounts to a payments appliance that can sit separate from, but be linked to, legacy core banking systems.  Aston said that the companies were currently working on a roadmap for their solution, and for the surrounding architecture and infrastructure that would be needed to allow the system to integrate with a bank's legacy or core banking system.Aston said the pressure to offer mobile and real-time processing will largely come from customer demand. A review of payments systems currently being undertaken by the Reserve Bank is bringing this into sharp focus.While batch systems continue to play an important role, Aston believes consumers are increasingly demanding real-time processing for most of their payments. "It is culture that will drive mobile payments - people don't expect that you can't access funds until the next day," he said."Systems in banks will not change overnight, but there are ways we can augment that. You do have to integrate with the traditional network and that's