thorough selection process, which included RFIs, RFPs, proof of concept and a follow-up detailed proof of concept with heavy performance testing. Although Akkermans would not disclose the names of competitors, he estimated that there were about 15 to 20 vendors on the long-list, both international players and domestic French companies. The shortlist was then narrowed to four or five offerings. The capacity of the system to process high volumes of transactions was top of the agenda, he said. ‘This is the group of banks that has a third of the market share in France and is the second largest payments processor in terms of volumes in Europe.’ The bank visited Clear2Pay’s reference sites, such as Banco Santander in Spain, which is similar to Crédit Agricole in terms of size, with a wide geographical spread across the globe. SEPA was a key consideration for the bank as well as local support from the vendor. Clear2Pay opened an office in Paris around the same time it became engaged in the selection process. Jean de Crane, the company’s managing director for the EMEA region, said the roll-out would be gradual, starting with SDDs and followed by SCTs. The bank had taken ‘most of Clear2Pay’s product range’, he added. Clear2Pay was responsible for the development and delivery of OPF to Crédit Agricole. A third party integrator would be in charge of the total solution and integration with the group’s multiple applications in head office and across the regional subsidiaries. Crédit Agricole then acquired Centea Bank from KBC in
2011 and decided to use OPF to aid the migration of accounts to its in-house systems, using Clear2Pay’s system as a payments switch for the duration of the migration. ‘OPF will be the payment traffic controller to make sure payments go to the right place. This depends on whether the account of a specific customer has been migrated or not,’ said Minjauw. ‘Once all the accounts have been moved, the idea is that the switch will no longer be necessary and will be turned off.’ He didn’t believe that OPF had been used in this way before. However, for Crédit Agricole ‘we are talking about the same type of functions, like validating and reformatting payment files, and routing instructions. It is based on the same functional components,’ he said. Centea Bank had over 600,000 customers, a three per cent share of the savings market and a seven per cent share of the home loans market in Belgium in 2010. In mid-2012, CEO of Crédit Agricole Cards and Payments,
Bernard Noel, told IBS the Clear2Pay implementation was ‘nearly finished’. The scope of the project was limited to SEPA. The acquisition of Diagram meant Clear2Pay had a fairly
strong presence in France. One area of activity here has been around the German-derived bank-to-bank and bank-to- corporate messaging protocol, Ebics (the Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard), which has been adopted in France to replace the Etebac protocols. Clear2Pay has worked with five or six clients, including several Japanese banks and La Banque Postale. Clear2Pay had also received interest related to Ebics from elsewhere. An Algerian bank, an existing Clear2Pay client, had signed and there had also been enquiries from Morocco.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had a couple of drivers
for taking BPH/OPF. One was regulation, with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) pushing for a modernisation of the country’s payments infrastructure. The threat was basically, if banks did not act, then the RBA would regulate, said CBA general manager, business banking and payments, David Ranasinghe. Secondly, there were new entrants, such as Paypal and, with their eyes on mobile payments, the telcos.
CBA decided that it made sense to tackle its payments
systems at the same time as it undertook its core banking system replacement. The bank has been implementing SAP’s core system, having started in 2008. Term deposits had been migrated by October 2010 and there would be a progressive move of all the bank’s retail deposits. The philosophy was to start with a small area of the business, with a few simple products, but also tackle as much of the integration as possible at the outset. By the end of the year, all savings products were scheduled to have been moved across, with lending to follow. Combined with the payments side, this is ‘definitely the biggest banking project that CBA has ever undertaken’, said Ranasinghe. The aim for payments was to take the logic out of the channels and back office applications and bring it into a hub. ‘It is driven largely on the back of the SAP implementation,’ said Ranasinghe. The project was expected to span two or three years. An RFI and RFP-based selection was undertaken. The architecture and newer technology of OPF were influential, said Ranasinghe. It also looked at SAP’s emerging payments platform plus the usual contenders such as Fundtech. In addition, CBA already had a relationship with Clear2Pay, having taken Sienna’s BillView product in 2003. CBA signed for OPF in 2008 and went live with a first
phase, for ATM and POS, in September 2009. All Swift traffic has been supported since the start of 2010. The bank has tried to keep as close to the vanilla version of OPF as possible, said Ranasinghe, something that was aided by the fact that it already covered the ‘nuances’ of the Australian market. The bank had identified around 15 payment processing components in total that would be replaced, either dedicated systems, such as ACI’s MTS, or components within broader applications. The new architecture would be based on one business logic, used by multiple platforms. This has been for CBA’s domestic operations as well as international, including New Zealand, Indonesia and Vietnam. In addition, the plan was for BankWest, acquired by CBA, to also be brought onto the core and the payments hub. For payments, it used MTS as well as Base24, also from ACI. ASB would go the same way, also now part of CBA. The project was extremely strategic and payments were viewed as a core part of CBA’s business, said Ranasinghe. In terms of benefits, one of the key ones is flexibility. For instance, by virtue of having a single Swift payments gateway, CBA can hook into new operations in two or three months, as happened with its Indian operation. ‘So we are already seeing some benefits and reuse.’ The platform should also support new payment types and there should be considerable cost savings and improved efficiency as a result of the rationalisation of systems.
Co-operative Financial Services There were parallels too between CBA and another OPF taker,
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