IBS Journal January 2016


Smartvista underpins Nepalese payments processor NEPS and eight member banks


Eight member banks of the Nepal Electronic Payments Systems (NEPS) initiative have replaced their legacy payment systems with the Smartvista solution provided by BPC Banking Technologies. The BPC services will take over the pay-


ment infrastructure at the member banks, including switching, ATM management and card issuing. The new solution, says BPC, will also allow Nepalese citizens and tour- ists to use their cards at any ATM device. Six of the eight banks, which include


Sunrise Bank, NIC Asia Bank and Siddhartha Bank, are already using NEPS, while remain- ing members will be migrating to the pro- ject in the upcoming months. CEO of NEPS, Amish Tamrakar, says


that the initiative will ‘change the game’ for payments throughout the country and will build a foundation for further innovations down the line. The implementation of Smartvista,


adds Rajan S. Narayan, managing director of BPC, Asia Pacific, ‘was not easy’. Catering to ‘complex and wide-ranging requirements’ in such a short space of time was a major challenge.


Alex Hamilton


Kathmandu, Nepal © Royonx, Wikipedia


FIS beats Fiserv in three-year patent fight


US banking software heavyweight FIS has won its three-year battle with rival Fiserv over allegations that it infringed four business method patents.


FIS and another domestic banking


software provider, Metavante (which FIS acquired in 2009), were sued in the United States District Court by Fiserv subsidiaries CheckFree and CashEdge in January 2012 for allegedly infringing the patents. Fiserv claimed that certain features


of FIS’s financial and payment solutions, including its Payment Manager product, infringed the asserted patents. In December 2014, the US Patent and


Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that all claims in Fiserv’s assert-


10


ed patents were unpatentable. The dispute has now been settled, with no monetary payment made or prom- ised by either party. Fiserv will dismiss its appeals of the patent office decisions, and the parties will dismiss the federal district court lawsuit. The patents Fiserv asserted against FIS


remain invalid. IBS Journal contacted Fiserv for their


comments on the result. Most of our questions were ignored,


but a Fiserv spokesperson says: ‘Although we disagree with the 2014 PTAB (Patent Trial and Appeal Board) ruling that found these four patents ineligible for protection, the recent legal trends related to patent eli-


© IBS Intelligence 2016 www.ibsintelligence.com


gibility have led to similar rulings for soft- ware patents across numerous industries. The 2014 PTAB rulings have no impact on Fiserv products and services.’ The spokesperson adds that Fiserv ‘has


a patent portfolio including more than 150 patents issued and pending’.


They had history Fiserv acquired CheckFree in 2007, for $4.4 billion. CashEdge is a more recent acquisition. This P2P payments specialist was bought in 2011, for $465 million. FIS’s subsidiary, Metavante, joined the


FIS group in 2009. The deal value was $2.94 billion.


Antony Peyton


news


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