Striving for new technologies

In a situation when TCO and performance are becoming especially relevant to everybody involved in the financial industry, modern banks all over the world are striving for new technologies to ensure both profitability and better marketing opportunities to cope with today’s overwhelming crisis and to make their businesses more competitive.

The card business is not an exception. Without a processing solution that supports multi-channel delivery the financial institution may well be left to invest in separate solutions to support different channels with the resultant cost, skills and integration overhead. In the end a payment is a payment and to maximize return investment any system user must seek to drive as many payment types and transactions as possible through its chosen platform. 

Legacy and proprietary systems impose both a cost burden and an inability to innovate on the financial institutions that operate them. Some of these systems were designed and architected 20-30 years ago and, whilst excellent in their day, they no longer serve the purpose of putting the customer at the centre of the bank’s services. Modern systems have been built around the concept of Open Systems in conformity with the industry standards that have emerged, for example ISO8583, EMV, PCI DSS, etc, and were designed to serve a financial market where growth can only be driven through innovation and systems must facilitate that. Their technological features allow modern solutions to create an effective customer management environment, better integrate to any IT and business infrastructure and support innovative products and services ensuring faster time-to-market. The latter is an essential reason why the banks prefer to build in-house solutions instead of using third party processing services.

Following market demands, BPC, a provider of software solutions for global financial businesses, offers a perfect alternative to legacy and ineffective home grown solutions, infamous for their high TCO, poor support of modern technologies and a lack of opportunities for modernisation – SmartVista Suite.

BPC’s SmartVista Suite was designed to cover all aspects of card, payments and e-payments business and offers a broad range of capabilities to effectively support and manage all sorts of card based banking products from a simple debit card to sophisticated multiple-account credit cards integrated with retail account maintenance and lending solutions. SmartVista solutions can be applied by any participant of the payment chain and makes a core, fully functional in-house processing platform for a retail bank, payment gateway, merchant processor, TPP/MSP, Agent organization, National Payment Network, etc.

Thanks to its modern architecture and the use of Open Standards, SmartVista ensures better opportunities for modernisation and integration as well as higher scalability and flexibility, allowing for lower TCO of every implemented solution. BPC has developed the following strategies to raise card business performance in the established markets:

➢ Migration from a legacy system (BPC has experience in business migration to SmartVista from the most of known processing and card management systems)
➢ Replacement of  ineffective home grown or proprietary solutions
➢ Modernisation of  ineffective solutions
➢ Integration of merging systems

Business development strategies supported by BPC

Migration from a legacy system
In the established markets, financial institutions running their card business on aging solutions currently often come to the conclusion that the complexity of the legacy systems makes their usage and upgrade difficult, requiring lengthy time and significant investments that often presents a serious obstacle for further business development. Large and dynamic financial institutions may choose to waste time and money on the systems upgrade or to completely replace the ineffective platform. BPC’s expertise and proven methodology of migration lets the company securely migrate business from any legacy system to a modern solution based on SmartVista within a short time period. The process of migration can be divided into stages or may be done at once.

Replacement of  ineffective solutions
Often business development is restrained by the limited opportunities provided by in-house developed solutions designed by banks. With business growth and everyday changes in the market, such solutions start to require optimisation or complete reengineering and often cause considerable financial losses which include both TCO and lost business profits. SmartVista allows for rapid replacement of the existing IT solutions without negative effects on existing products or services. The process of migration can be divided into stages or may be done at once.

Modernisation of  ineffective solutions
Development of the existing IT infrastructure is often required by banks preparing to extend their range of services and products but wishing to retain their existing processing solution. SmartVista’s modular architecture allows banks to purchase the modules they need when they need them, this lowers the cost of ownership by reducing initial software costs and machine loadings during the transition and reduces the time-to-market of the modern products and services. In addition, SmartVista has a range of ready interfaces and its open architecture provides excellent opportunities for integration into any IT and business environment.

Integration of merging systems
Business growth through Mergers and Acquisitions is one of the most popular trends in the banking sector today. The M&A deals usually result in increased customer base and self-service networks while the customers usually expect higher quality of services from a larger entity. These parameters represent a 24x7 face of the financial institution and require strong technological support. One or both of the merging banks may be running obsolete or legacy systems and the cost of migration to an already outdated system or integration of the two weak platforms is not worth the investment. M&A activity is a good time to assess the position of the installed systems in their lifecycle. In this situation BPC provides two proven approaches. The first one implies quick business migration to a new modern platform,supporting new business volumes and enhancement of services and products. Another strategy proven to be profitable is the use of SmartVista as an integration solution and a payment hub. It combines all the delivery channels used by the emerging institutions and provides them with a high performance switch and an authorization engine which transfers the incoming transactions to the required existing CMS solution. In such a situation the existing IT infrastructures do not require enormous changes and need much less time for their integration.

Why SmartVista?
The exceptional advantages of SmartVista were proven by a number of international analytical agencies including Gartner. In 2008 SmartVista became the only system givethe highest possible rating – Strong Positive – in Gartner Marketscope for Card Management Solutions among the products offered by other industry leaders.

Currently SmartVista is used by the largest European, CIS and Asian retail banks, and processing companies, including the Diners Club franchise in New Zealand, NETS in Singapore, Savings Bank of Russia, the Federal Customs Service payment network in Russia, Gazprombank, Alfa-Bank, subsidiaries of ING Bank and BNP Paribas Group, Security Bank Corporation in the Philippines and many more.

Designed to fit the needs of the modern financial industry, BPC’s SmartVista was built on Open Standards, the way forward for dynamic new enterprises. It is proven to be very scalable, which makes it suitable for banks with few cards issued and small numbers of ATMs and POS devices to some of the largest banks with millions of issued cards, tens of thousands of ATMs and POS, and still provides perfect opportunities for the business growth. Today the largest SmartVista based processing center supports over 31M cards, over 135 000 POS-terminals, 18 500 ATMs, processing over 7M TPD while benchmarks have shown that the system can be increased in scale even further reaching throughputs of over 7000tps on real workloads.

In addition to traditional card management functionality BPC’s SmartVista provides a universal tool for quick implementation of modern card business technologies and value added services, including e-Commerce and m-Commerce, risk management, fraud prevention, loyalty and affinity schemes, self-service and retail banking features, etc. The parameterisation and flexibility of the solution ensure quick launch of new products and services and rapid adaptation to the market changes.

As for project management, BPC supports its customers at every stage of processing solution implementation from pre-project consultancy and choice of equipment vendors to certification and post-implementation maintenance.

With BPC’s investment in R&D, it will remain a leader which gives its customers new business opportunities and new, integrated delivery channels. The modern design and architecture of its SmartVista solutions ensure that the investment made to SmartVista will turn to better profit and business opportunities.

To get more information on BPC and SmartVista, please visit the company’s official site: www.bpcsv.com.

About BPC
BPC is an international IT company specialising in systems integration and software development for the global card and e-payments industry.

The company offers the whole range of services in the sphere of deployment and modernisation of the entire IT infrastructure to support all operations related to cards and e-payments. BPC has significant experience in migration of businesses from legacy and ineffective solutions and integration of systems used by merging financial institutions. All BPC’s projects are realised on the basis of its own set of modern software products – SmartVista Suite.

Today BPC has a strong global reach with a sales, marketing and support presence in branches and subsidiaries operating throughout Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. In addition the company is represented through corporate business partners in different regions and has strong alliance relationships with industry leaders actively expanding its market presence.

Contact details:

BPC Europe
Nigel Cox, General Manager
13 Springhill Park, Lower Penn
Wolverhampton, West Midlands, WV4 4TS
T: +44 (1902) 324689
F: +44 (1902) 324689
E: bpceurope@bpcsv.com

BPC Russia
Sergey Lukianov, Deputy CEO
Bld. 2, 50A/8 Zemlyanoy Val St.
Moscow, Russia, 109028
T: + 7 (495) 780 3165
F: + 7 (495) 780 3167
E: info@bpcsv.com
 
BPC MEA
Faris Al-Mashta, General Manager MEA
P.O.Box. 293874, 6EA 128
Dubai Airport Free Zone, Dubai , UAE
T: +971 46091838
F: +971 (4) 609 1841
E: bpcmea@bpcsv.com

BPC Asia Pacific
Rajan S. Narayan, Director Asia Pacific & Latin America
Level 36 UOB Plaza 1,
80 Raffles Place, Singapore 048624
T:  +65 6248 4760
F:  +65 6248 4501
E: bpc-ap@bpcsv.com