of South Africa, said Christo Vrey, managing executive of the South African bank’s digital channels division. Around half of the country’s population of 50 million fell into this category. The process is necessarily ‘simple and secure’, said Vrey.
The recipient receives an SMS with a ten-digit code (originated by the system) and information about the transfer amount. The recipient then receives another SMS (or a phone call) from the sender with another code, this time a six-digit one, generated by the sender. All the recipient needs to do then is to input the two corresponding codes and the exact amount into any one of ABSA’s domestic ATMs and the money will be distributed from the machine. Meanwhile, the sender and the bank can trace the full transaction history if any dispute arises. According to ABSA’s statistics, by mid-2011 the CashSend service was clocking up at least 100,000 transactions per month, with the equivalent of more than $81 million being transferred. ‘The CashSend functionality has opened up multiple user experiences,’ stated Vrey. Typical small sums such as payments to labourers for services such as gardening and housework, or parents giving money to children, can be facilitated, this making it usable by banked and unbanked alike.
In the spirit of inclusivity, the CashSend service had now also been extended to SMEs. CashSend Plus, as it is known, enables small business owners to pay their staff, via an ATM, using the same principle as for retail customers. ABSA was also considering international expansion, said Vrey. Whilst the regulatory side of the cross-border venture is ‘extremely complicated and limiting’, there are, he commented, no obstacles in terms of technology and capability. Another interesting Base24-eps recuit is Crédit Agricole
Group, which has the system at the centre of an overhaul of its payments infrastructure. The vision is a single payments processing platform on IBM Power 770 Systems. The venture includes developing a new ATM acquiring solution for Crédit Agricole’s network of 22,000 ATMs; building an international switch to enable its customers’ payments to go directly to Mastercard, bypassing France’s national switch; and using Base24-eps to authorise transactions for 30 million cards issued by the head bank and its subsidiaries. There are also far- reaching plans to attract financial institutions outside Crédit Agricole Group onto the new payments platform. Crédit Agricole started working with ACI in 2009. Looking back at the drivers, Bernard Noel, CEO of Crédit Agricole Cards and Payments (what used to be known as Cedicam), said, in 2012: ‘Having the largest market share in France is not enough for Crédit Agricole to survive and be competitive ten years from now’. There were two ways for the bank to increase volumes. One was to connect external customers to the group’s payments platform (which Crédit Agricole had not done before), the other was to grow via partnerships with companies and industry bodies in the payments industry. For the former, Crédit Agricole had already signed the first
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customer, HSBC France (it was to be connected to the payments platform in 2013).
Noel (with 25 years of experience of working in the banking sector, including for Citibank and Société Générale) felt competition would become tougher, so Crédit Agricole should consider the payments business as strategic, not just as a ‘cost issue’. Customer loyalty was paramount, and the best way to achieve it was through competitive pricing and good customer service. Running costs of the new consolidated platform underpinned by Base24-eps were lower than those of the bank’s competitors, claimed Noel. This, he explained, was achieved by replacing eight solutions with a single one, thus consolidating resources, attaining harmonisation and standardisation, and saving on expenditures otherwise required for replicating the system across subsidiaries. ‘Dealing with massive volumes on one big platform makes the cost side very attractive.’ However, the building costs were ‘huge’, Noel admitted.
Crédit Agricole was investing €300 million in this initiative over five to six years (it was halfway through by late 2012). Working with ACI had been a positive experience, he said. Pioneering Base24-eps in France was a challenge, ‘but ACI has demonstrated flexibility and commitment to the project and to meeting deadlines. We are satisfied’. Compared to the difficulties Crédit Agricole had experienced with other suppliers, he added, ‘ACI is one of the best’. He also remarked favourably on the system, describing its response time and performance as ‘very good’.
Noel felt the payments platform undertaking of Crédit Agricole was unique in Europe. ‘We don’t know of any other business platform in Europe that has made such a choice and is so advanced in this project.’ Crédit Agricole intended to also start to consolidate its international payments by the end of 2012 or early 2013. ‘We will concentrate the group’s entire volume on one platform. One billion transactions on one platform – you won’t find this anywhere else.’ For MTS, a significant cut-over came at the ABN Amro-
derived wholesale banking part of RBS for euro clearing in July 2009. There was a fair amount of customisation to meet the bank’s requirements and there were some changes in scope as a result of the takeover of ABN which put back the timescales somewhat. Other forms of payments might be moved across, said a source at the bank, but there had been no decisions at that time. The project started more than two years earlier, with MTS having been preferred to offerings from the likes of IBM and Logica, as well as SAP with its emerging payments system. One of the larger MTS projects of the last few years has
been at Bank of New York Mellon, which has used it as a global wholesale payments hub for clearing and settlement. The bank is using it for Swift, Chips processing and as an interface to Fedwire, plus interfaces to additional central banking systems, messaging systems, net settlement systems and clearing houses. Central management of large-scale liquidity
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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