Uptake and customer experiences DNB
An early customer was DnB NOR (now DNB), with the first phase of a project running through 2005 centred on Clear2Pay’s BPH Customer Interaction solution. Covering the bank’s Nordic operations, this was intended to allow corporate customers to send single bulk files of payments to be executed from any Nordic branch. A second phase, scheduled to go live in the third quarter of 2006, was meant to extend this capability across the bank’s other operations, in the UK, US and Singapore. Large companies were tending to centralise their payments, said DnB NOR senior consultant, Henning Sørum. They wanted the banks to handle the distribution of the payments, rather than doing it themselves. The Clear2Pay software would be incorporated into the bank’s order management system at the customer end. At the back-end, it would be integrated with the bank’s in-house developed domestic payments systems and would handle formatting, validation and routing. Acknowledgments, exceptions reports, credit/debit advices, and statements of account would be delivered to the customer.
The choice of Clear2Pay was made in June, with the project
starting not long after this. A relatively swift implementation was one of the criteria for the selection, said Sørum. Clear2Pay did not have an exact reference site with this sort of capability, with the closest being ANZ (going back to Sienna’s Australian roots). However, DnB NOR had confidence in the Belgian supplier’s ability to deliver and BPH was felt to have more or less the required functionality. Other banks in the Nordic region had this sort of capability, said Sørum, but ‘where I believe it is different and will make us maybe a bit more attractive is that it makes no demands on the formats that customers use’. Benefits for the customers were expected to be increased STP and improved transparency.
Standard Bank
Standard Bank is an interesting taker of OPF. It went live in a pilot project in Uganda in September 2008 for corporate clients, with cut-over following in Nigeria, then Tanzania and Ghana. The bank was implementing OPF in each African country but at some stage in the future there was a plan to centralise, pulling everything back into South Africa. The roll-out was part of a new payments architecture being put in place for the bank’s non-domestic operations in Africa, aimed at providing corporates with a consistent look and feel. Clear2Pay’s involvement stemmed from a selection in the first half of 2007 which was described by Clear2Pay’s VP, strategy and marketing, Mark Hartley, as ‘very long, drawn out’ and ‘involving every contender’. At home, one part of the bank’s payments systems overhaul involved Logica (now CGI), with its version of Dovetail’s payments engine. OPF constitutes a ‘middle office’ layer, facilitating the
provision of online payment services for the receipt and processing of client instructions. These services include validation, authorisation, risk assessment and exception
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handling for payments and collections. No one from the bank was available to comment but reasons cited for the original selection included the J2EE technology of OPF and Clear2Pay’s partnership approach. According to Hartley, the Software Development Kit within OPF was also felt to be a strength, allowing the bank to do its own enhancements around the core, particularly for country specific needs. Ultimately, the project is intended to span 17 countries. In terms of centralising, Hartley believed this might happen earlier than originally planned, starting with the initial four countries. There had been a few changes of direction; the overall project was intended to take two years. The bank is replacing Stanbic-derived systems called Business Online and CATS Africa.
Santander
Also notable was a major deal from Grupo Santander. Within a multi-year project, Santander decided to move all of its international and domestic payments across the globe to OPF. The decision was made in the second half of 2008 and followed a proof of concept project which was centred on one transaction type in one of the bank’s international operations. The full roll-out was for the replacement of a wide range of disparate systems, in part inherited from the bank’s aggressive acquisition strategy. Clear2Pay had been talking to the bank for close to two years and there was a full selection process, said Akkermans. ‘It is a very important win, it is doing what OPF was designed to do from the beginning.’ Geert Minjauw, Clear2Pay’s sales executive for Spain, said: ‘The end goal is for all of the transactions for the whole group to be on the platform’. In terms of the architecture, the phased roll-out would see
the bank’s silo payments systems gradually replaced, with OPF used to ‘wrap’ these and then a gradual switching off. The bank planned a range of projects and sub-projects, all heading towards a global architecture. In terms of priorities, Minjauw declined to go into too much detail but cited SDDs and SEPA Credit Transfers (SCTs) as areas of focus at the outset. No one from the bank was available to comment. The technology and early SEPA support were given by
Akkermans as reasons for the selection. And Clear2Pay had international reach, including a track-record in South America, which is clearly an important continent for Santander. Here, Clear2Pay software supported a number of banks via a Miami- based hub run by a company called ToDo1. One of ToDo1’s main customers, Banco Mercantil in
Venezuela, uses Clear2Pay’s EBPP solution, making it available to more than 750,000 Mercantil customers and bill service providers. ToDo1 is providing this on a SaaS model.
Crédit Agricole
Following on from Santander, Clear2Pay landed a deal with Crédit Agricole. OPF was taken by the group’s payment processing subsidiary, CEDICAM (later rebranded as Crédit Agricole Cards and Payments), for supporting credit and debit transfers on a group-wide scale. The bank went through a
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