Uptake and customer experiences
The most extensive and highest profile payments project has been over quite a few years at Société Générale. SocGen is using what was the payments portion of Quartz, now TCS Bancs Payments, for corporate cash management and payment services for customers and partner banks, initially across seven countries in Europe.
SocGen was the first taker of the Quartz system in France and signed as the first to use the system in a multi-entity, multi- site, cross-border environment. The bank took Quartz for its Global Banking Services division to support its international operations, initially spanning Switzerland, Spain, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. Quartz was taken to handle payments and client account management. The selection followed a proof of concept study which saw Quartz implemented at the bank on a test basis. Quartz was selected to provide institutional banks and corporate clients with banking services in the areas of domestic and international payments, client account management products, billing, and other related areas. The project included a fairly hefty integration aspect with internal and external systems and drew heavily on resources from TCS.
The Quartz implementation was actually the third phase
in a project called European Back Office Services (EBOS). Previously, the bank had been using multiple systems to handle payments in the countries in which it was operating, with different systems used to handle the different payments products being transacted. The bank’s aim was to have a single platform, which would accommodate multiple products. This would mean that SocGen’s customers would benefit from homogeneous service levels, and the bank itself would benefit from real-time reporting of payments information and positions.
The first phase was to bring the bank’s systems from the
seven European operations into Paris. The first to be moved across was that of Zurich, in October 2000. The second phase was to improve these disparate systems and the associated processes to enhance the bank’s STP. The third phase was to see each of the country systems replaced by Quartz, running from the bank’s Paris data centre and supporting each country on a hub and spoke basis. As a result, full multi-entity support was being added to the system, so too support for regulatory requirements for each country. By the end of October 2006, the roll-out had reached a fourth cut-over, with London following on from Zurich, Madrid and Frankfurt. The bank then took a ‘breather’ of around one year, partly to carry out some SEPA-related developments. By mid-2009 the roll-out was approaching the final leg, with Brussels and Amsterdam planned for Q1 2010 which has been completed. In 2013, SocGen extended its payments work with TCS to include a hub in Singapore. As of 2017, this
program has been delivered and is live in Singapore and Honk Kong. Two subsequent customers, unnamed, were claimed. One
was a sizeable Middle Eastern bank which took TCS Bancs Payments to support both retail and wholesale payments, and a US bank for end-to-end payment integration for ACH-based transactions. Other Payments users are First Rand Group, to support international payments processing and vostro account services, in South Africa, Capitec Bank in South Africa, which is also a user of the core banking solution, and Barclays for payment switching and channel functions in multiple countries in Africa. Guangdong Rural Co-operative Credit Union in China uses a payments module within its Bancs core banking implementation. There was a payments deal, announced in June 2011, from
PostFinance, an autonomous business unit of Swiss Post and the country’s major payment transaction services provider. It set about migrating its account management operations and payment transactions onto Bancs. The transition was expected to take around four years. The company’s existing software was developed by a small local outfit in co-operation with PostFinance nearly 20 years earlier, said Enrico Lardelli, CIO at PostFinance. According to a statement issued by PostFinance, the legacy solutions were ‘still very powerful, stable and efficient’, but their ‘maintenance and further development are reaching their limits’. The process of choosing a new system lasted two years and involved an RFI (to 14 vendors and an in-house option), followed by an RFP (to six vendors and an in-house option) and finally a proof-of- concept for two vendors and an in-house solution. This stage lasted seven months. PostFinance had the largest share of the payments business in Switzerland, processing nearly 900 million transactions annually, so the choice of suitable solutions in the market was quite limited, noted Lardelli. ‘We evaluated systems for payment services, account management and securities,’ he said. ‘The evaluation contained every suitable solution and vendor.’ PostFinance also considered a number of in-house development routes to build either the whole functionality or just the payment services module. Bancs was chosen on the basis that it was ‘a modular, highly
configurable system’ that could handle high performance requirements and was ‘widely spread over a lot of countries and businesses’, said Lardelli. ‘TCS was also chosen because of the good price ratio and the short migration plan, and it is the most economic option for PostFinance,’ he added. The financial terms were not disclosed, but Lardelli described the venture as ‘one of the biggest projects in PostFinance’s history’.
The system was taken on Intel-based hardware, with a
Linux operating system and Oracle databases. The ‘migration preparing phase’ would last until the end of 2011. The migration itself was scheduled to take around four years, starting with
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