Product suite
The Bank Payment Hub (BPH) was derived from the aforementioned Australian company, Sienna Technologies, acquired by Clear2Pay in 2004. This Java-based payment engine forms the core of Clear2Pay’s suite, now dubbed the Open Payment Framework (OPF). Akkermans said the J2EE- based solution had been ‘built from the ground up’ and this seemed a reasonable claim. Clear2Pay had then been able to use significant venture capital investment to broaden and deepen the offering.
BPH is a centralised payments infrastructure spanning customer interaction, order management and payment execution. It supports SEPA, international payments, billing and bill payment routing, cheque processing, low-value and high-value payments. There is a component for cheque image processing. For cheque image clearing, Clear2Pay had an early solution but this was replaced by the BPH component. A couple of US banks used OPF in this domain, so too Bank of Thailand (see below). Using what head of Asia Pacific, Warren Gardiner, described as the ‘precursor to OPF’, Clear2Pay also provided the cheque image processing platform for Singapore a few years earlier. Gardiner was one of the co-founders of Sienna Technologies.
A version of BPH/OPF is positioned for corporates as the Corporate Payment Hub (CPH). It centralises and standardises payment processing and, via workflow, also enables subsidiaries to perform their payment activities. It is meant to allow corporates to eliminate the use of multiple local electronic banking systems and standardises bank interfaces without the need to adopt bank specific software and standards. There is a Software Development Kit (SDK) within OPF. This
Strategy
Clear2Pay has a broad suite, mainly Java-based, and there has been work to integrate the components and add functionality for new international markets. A number of the products are restricted from a geographical perspective, so there is work needed to bring them to a wider audience. Akkermans had talked about the gaps in Clear2Pay’s geographical presence as likely to be filled by additional acquisitions. The two acquisitions in late 2011 were notable. Level Four was
the third testing-related acquisition Clear2Pay had made since 2007, and Clear2Pay’s Ingels stated that ‘it is the intention of our company to build that out into an open testing suite on a global scale with a common goal and a common management team’. The acquisition of ISTS, meanwhile, reflected the ambition of Clear2Pay to build out service offerings additional to its software business, and also to strengthen its position in the cards sector. Level Four was founded in 1995 and had 30 staff. Its HQ was in Scotland and it had recently finished its first project in Asia, as well as picking up a first customer in Australia at National Australia Bank (NAB). Level Four had a client base which included tier one banks such as Bank of America and
allows customers to add and change components. There are also the Integri-derived testing tools for payment, smartcard and mobile solutions. Clear2Pay also has a Chargeback (CBK) reporting package for management of credit and debit card disputed transactions. This provides a single interface for both issuer and acquirer activity, covering exception processing problems related to disputed transactions or customer claims. Via Sienna, there is also an electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) solution, BillView Integrator. There is an e-banking solution, stemming from the
Diagram acquisition. Now called the OPF eBanking suite, it is intended to cover both corporate and retail banking for internet, mobile, interactive voice, branch banking and on-line trading. Reflecting the French roots of Diagram, it is mainly used in France and French-speaking Africa. This is sold on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis as
B-Web and is largely used in Africa. One user with B-Web is Bank of Africa, one of the largest banks on the continent, servicing over 700,000 accounts, albeit with a much smaller number of internet banking customers to date. It signed in late 2009 and uses it across multiple countries. There are two products on the card side. ProxyPay3/M
is a platform for processing online payment transactions. As a front-end between the internet or POS servers and the systems of an acquirer, it is used for e-payment transaction validation and processing. ClearPark is a pan-European online payment and settlement solution for acquirers, built in an ASP model. ClearPark allows merchants to accept worldwide electronic payments for transactions using Visa, MasterCard and Amex cards as well local bank paybuttons, from a call centre, a web shop, via web forms, in batch processing mode or through a direct connection to a back- end system.
BMO. Level Four’s Bridge Test product is aimed at automating the testing banks need to do for each software release in their ATMs, of which there may be up to six a year. It had a library of thousands of test scripts. ‘We are also looking at how we might apply our technology to adjacent spaces in the payments environment, such as retail self-checkouts,’ said CEO, Ian Kerr. ISTS was based in California but had an office in France
and resources in India, a country Clear2Pay was interested in. ‘In the past we have been approached by banks there, but no formal decisions have been taken, and we have been in a passive stance. But it is clear that banks are looking at modernising their payments structures, and with our own sales force on the ground, we will start to outline the benefits of our payments hub,’ said Akkermans, at the time of the deal. There looked to be fairly advanced talks in 2012 whereby
Clear2Pay would have been bought by Infosys. It is known that the Indian company had staff on-site at Clear2Pay doing due diligence. For whatever reason, the deal was not finalised, with a similar outcome later in the year when Infosys pursued US core banking system provider, Open Solutions.
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