2007 In China, Clear2Pay buys an 85-person payments company, Data House. There is a network called CNAPS to which banks in the country must connect for international payments and cheque image exchange. Data House provided connectivity to this, with customers spanning both domestic players and the Chinese operations of overseas banks, such as Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas.
2007
November – Clear2Pay buys Integri, a Belgian supplier of test tools and test services for payments, ticketing and mobile applications.
2007
December – Clear2Pay acquires French company, Diagram EDI, a long-standing e-banking and payment solutions provider. Set up in 1986, Diagram had internet banking solutions for retail and corporate banking environments. It had offices in France, Algeria and Egypt and a user base slanted to France and French- speaking Africa. Clients included BNP Paribas, Société Générale, BCI, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Banque Centrale Populaire (BCP). Akkermans said the Diagram product suite complemented
Clear2Pay’s Netbank product, and the functionality of both would be integrated into the OPF environment.
Mid-2009
Unisys ties up with Dovetail as its main OPP partner, seemingly reversing the decision to go with Clear2Pay. The two companies gained a high profile win in the first half of 2007 with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland for a cheque and image processing system for itself and eleven other US federal reserve banks. Rein Geerdes, Unisys’ business development head, payments solutions and services, said only that Unisys was still available as a system integrator for Clear2Pay projects. Unisys undertook a thorough investigation before making the decision, said Geerdes. It felt Dovetail’s single platform and architecture was superior to all of its competitors. In addition, Dovetail’s focus on being a development shop meant it complemented Unisys’ systems integration and services skills. Akkermans said the Unisys relationship still stood as far as he was concerned. ‘Our success as a company to date means we haven’t been that focused on the Unisyses of this world,’ he added. He said Clear2Pay’s separate international ACH project with the main Federal Reserve Bank was going ‘very well’ and there was a ‘great relationship’. No one from the Federal Reserve was willing to comment. On the cheque and image processing project, on the other hand, with the twelve Federal Reserve banks, Clear2Pay was only one part and was a
sub-contractor, he said. As such, he declined to comment on this.
Unisys said it would also use the Dovetail system to support a hosted European mandate service for SEPA Direct Debits (SDDs). The service was an extension of Unisys’ Payment Services and Solutions outsource centre in the Netherlands. In fact, the service had been announced in December 2007, once more with Clear2Pay at the centre.
Mid-2009 Clear2Pay buys Beijing-based ETH Tech Limited. This complemented its Shenzhen office and, said Akkermans, satisfied Clear2Pay’s desire for a presence closer to its Beijing- based clients. Clear2Pay claimed around 100 users here. The link-up with ETH stemmed from a presentation in
Beijing which Clear2Pay was giving to a number of banks. ETH was working with some of these and discussions originated from there. ETH was founded in 2004 with a focus on Business Intelligence (BI). Several of the country’s largest banks were customers, including the central bank. It now formed Clear2Pay Beijing, kicking off with 20 staff. It took Clear2Pay’s overall headcount in the country to 80. As well as ETH’s expertise and customer base, Clear2Pay said it would look to bring the BI capabilities into its payment offerings, with this seen as a growing requirement for compliance and business analysis.
In total, Clear2Pay now had eleven offices and over
450 staff and wanted to be local and close to the customer, said Akkermans. There are cultural and local operational differences between Shenzhen and Beijing, so ETH would help bridge these. Clear2Pay acquired 100 per cent of the ETH shares; financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
2009
December – Clear2Pay secures a €50 million investment from a new shareholder, New York-based Aquiline Capital Partners, and existing investors. Akkermans said the money would be spent on the company’s expansion via acquisitions in various geographies. The main areas of interest were the Americas, the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe. Clear2Pay’s board apparently approved the acquisition strategy earlier in the year, when it realised that ‘the year was looking a lot better than originally anticipated’, and that ‘compared to competition Clear2Pay’s business was growing’. ‘The payments and cards market is still very fragmented,’
he said. ‘So we won’t be making one large acquisition, but instead we’ll make several mid-sized ones.’ He expected two to three deals to be completed by the end of Q2 2010. The range of companies that Clear2Pay was targeting included software developers, integrators and consultancy firms, as the vendor
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