Banksys handles change with WAY4

Banksys is one of the largest processing centres in Europe, providing major Belgian banks with card, merchant and transaction processing services. Customers include ING, Dexia, Fortis, KBC and BCC Corporate.

Banksys was founded in 1989 through the merger of two Belgian payment networks: Mister Cash and Bancontact. All major Belgian commercial banks were shareholders of Banksys until December 2006 when Atos Origin announced the completion of the acquisition of Banksys  and the Bank Card Company (BCC) through its subsidiary, Atos Worldline.

The acquisition of Banksys and Bank Card Company (BCC) created a European leader in Payment Services, with combined pro forma 2006 revenues of EUR 630 million and 4.000 employees

Industry: Financial Services
Project: Commercial Cards Issuing and Acquiring
Solutions: WAY4 CMS, WAY4 Self-Service, WAY4 Commercial CMS
Project Implementer: OpenWay Group

Business Challenges
For many years the geographical centre of the European Union, Belgium has become the European home of a large number of international firms and organisations. In this fast-moving business hub, Belgium’s banks were eager to find a payment processor with the ability to handle their commercial card portfolios.

Commercial cards refer to those categories of cards designed to meet the needs of commercial enterprises; for example, corporate cards for large organisations, business cards for small businesses, purchasing cards for companies making frequent small purchases and travel key/lodge cards provided by travel agents to frequent travelers.

Commercial cards offer many benefits to businesses, including the increased efficiency that comes with detailed reporting, savings from reduced accounting overheads and simplified VAT management and reclamation.

Bank Card Company (BCC) wanted a new payment processing solution, to be processed by Banksys that would provide:

• Deep integration with legacy systems
• Smooth data migration
• Excellent level of services
• Minimum time-to-market for new requirements

"We needed a system that would give us the flexibility and reliability to satisfy fast-changing market requirements," says Jan Jambon, General Manager BCC Corporate.

WAY4 Solution
BCC Corporate and Banksys chose WAY4 to manage issuing and acquiring of all their commercial cards.

BCC Corporate’s decision was influenced by WAY4’s flexible and hierarchical structure, as seen in its carefully structured modular design and open standards architecture. This gave Banksys the flexibility to customise a wide range of applications for BCC Corporate clients.

Project Stages

• OpenWay held a workshop and demonstration for BCC and Banksys in February/March 2001.
• A business analysis for purchasing cards was carried out in June 2001.
• By November 2001, the purchasing card functionality was installed.
• In February 2002, the project team carried out business analysis for commercial cards.
• Bank personnel were trained and all commercial cards migrated to WAY4 by September 2002.
• The system was fully operational in November 2002, with one-to-one correspondence with scheduler and budget.

The Results
The project was completed successfully. Today, WAY4 provides Banksys with the following benefits:

• Intelligent authorisation and unlimited billing hierarchy
• Cross-border issuing for the full range of commercial credit cards processed by Banksys (corporate, lodge, purchasing and business cards) plus efficient corporate policy control
• Purchase card acquiring
• Flexible fees and billing
• Enhanced data and invoice processing
• Direct debit interface (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg), Oracle Finance (GL), SAP
• Ad hoc corporate reporting
• VAT reporting
• Web reporting
• EMV