WebRiposte™ provides Europe's largest retail/banking network - The Post Office in the UK - with a foundation for developing and distributing EAI and business-to-business e-commerce solutions

Boston, Mass. - January 19, 2001 - Escher Group Ltd, the leading provider of solutions to the postal industry, today announced that The Post Office in the UK, one of the world's largest global distribution companies, has selected WebRiposte™ as the platform for its network banking projects. WebRiposte is Escher's newly released Web-enabled, peer-to-peer, distributed messaging solution that includes content distribution and storage. ICL Pathway will deploy WebRiposte on behalf of The Post Office throughout the country's retail outlets. This platform will serve as the foundation upon which distributed, Web-based applications can be built. With the introduction of WebRiposte, The Post Office plans to offer extensive banking services, bureau de change, and a range of e-commerce services targeted at the 28 million customers that visit The Post Office each week.

"WebRiposte is essential to our strategic technology infrastructure. We have witnessed the power of Riposte® in automating our retail network, and WebRiposte will now provide the secure, reliable, cost-effective platform we need in order to exploit the opportunities presented by the Internet." said Basil Shall, director of IS, network banking, The Post Office.

Dave Smith, automation director for The Post Office Network, said: "the whole team is very excited by the prospect of the existing service infrastructure being Web-enabled. Banking requires security, integrity and reliability, all of which we know WebRiposte supports".

The Post Office in the UK has been a customer of Escher Group since 1996. At that time, Escher's flagship messaging product, Riposte, was chosen to automate 40,000 counter positions within 20,000 post offices, giving The Post Office the largest secure retail/banking computer network in Europe. For the year 1999-2000, The Post Office achieved a transaction volume of 2.42 billion amounting to a value of $239 billion. WebRiposte is built upon the core messaging infrastructure that has been deployed in the Riposte product line. With WebRiposte, customers maintain the benefits of a high-volume, fault-tolerant, distributed, transaction-processing platform while gaining support for Internet standards and a full set of XML-messaging and content delivery services.

"In one of the most intensive transaction-based industries worldwide, accurate and timely information exchange is critical," said a spokesperson for Escher Group. "With WebRiposte The Post Office in the UK has a rock-solid foundation for reliable information exchange and transaction processing. The Post Office can now support Internet transactions both within and outside the retail network in a secure and reliable manner."

About Escher Group, Limited

Escher Group Limited is a leading provider of distributed transaction processing and data management solutions and services. The company offers a business-to-business XML-based transaction management environment, used in thousands of locations worldwide. Since its introduction in 1993, Riposte®, Escher's flagship messaging solution, has grown to become the market leader in post office counter automation.

Trademarks: WebRiposte and Riposte are trademarks or registered trademarks of Escher Group, Limited in the United States and/or other countries. All other product names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Information:

Escher Group Limited
information@eschergroup.com