service. Notable projects
A broad customer is Banca Transilvania, which signed in August 2009 as BPC’s first Romanian recruit. This was to replace the TNS solution, which had been in place for over a decade and was about to have its support withdrawn by ACI. There were two options, said the bank’s IT director, Marius Ursuti: buy the source code or replace the system. ‘The logical decision, as we are a bank and not a software house, was to find another system on the market.’
At the shortlist stage, BPC was pitted against ACI, Metavante and Openway. The bank evaluated the functionality, potential speed of implementation, ease of migration and price. SmartVista was deemed to be a strong offering backed up by a good team. ‘They had a lot of expertise and, at the end, the best price as well,’ said Ursuti. There was also strong commitment, with the bank meeting BPC’s president and CEO during the selection. The functionality was a good fit and the platform also looked to offer new possibilities. Sberbank and Alfa Bank were visited as references and provided further reassurance.
The solution went live in March 2010. The bank took the complete suite for front-end and back-end processing, including card switching, internet acquiring, loyalty cards and fraud management. At around the time of the signing, the bank had issued over 1.5 million cards including EMV cards and supported over 12,000 POS terminals and 800 ATMs. Having gone live, another phase of the project commenced to implement Western Union money transfer, allowing the bank’s ATM network to initiate card to cash and cash to card transactions. Would-be rival to Visa and MasterCard, Payfair, was a
notable recruit, with SmartVista one part of its infrastructure, alongside Distra’s solution and Monext from GFG for e-commerce. Given Distra is in Australia, GFG in New Zealand and BPC in Russia, Belgium-based Payfair was clearly not averse to shopping around, particularly as it has a number of vendors much nearer to home (including Clear2Pay). Payfair signed for SmartVista in late 2009 and was live with a first phase in July 2010. The BPC piece handles the back-end clearing and settlement processes.
BPC gained its first signing in Latin America, at Banco Atlantida in Honduras, in mid-2009. Rajan Narayan, BPC’s managing director for the region, suggested that BPC would avoid, at least initially, a more permanent presence in the region, since it would translate into higher costs for BPC’s customers. Atlantida itself had looked at various vendors before choosing SmartVista, for a broad replacement of its legacy systems. SmartVista was taken to support all of the bank’s retail payment processing, and was due to go live in early 2010. Narayan suggested that one strong reason for its choice of SmartVista was the lower total cost of ownership
over the life of the system, in comparison with competing vendors for the tender such as ACI. On completion of the Atlantida
implementation, the vendor planned a more concerted campaign to pick up contracts in the region, using the Honduran bank as a reference. BPC also completed its first project in South Africa, for Vela ATM, an ATM outsourcing firm, in 2009.
The Americas
BPC’s breakthrough in North America came in the second half of 2010 at Electronic Funds Transfer Experts (EFX) Corp, a US-based third party payment processor. The deal followed BPC opening an office in Omaha, Nebraska. SmartVista was taken to support EFX’s new store value card issuing (to add to the company’s existing activity in ATM, POS and ACH processing). BPC was recruited to supply a full card issuing and merchant management solution for debit and proprietary cards. By October, the gap analysis stage had been completed and BPC was developing the interfaces to EFX’s external systems, including Fiserv’s gateway and Experian for fraud checks. The go-live was planned for mid to late November, said Don Gentry, chief executive of EFX. EFX spent about a year looking for new software and evaluated two international and two domestic offerings. The main criteria were high levels of configurability and parameterisation of the solution, said Gentry, and the resulting fast and easy time-to-market. ‘In my experience, the worst case scenario for a platform is when every new feature, product or regulatory requirement has to be met by new coding. We needed all these to be achieved just by configuration. And that is where BPC shone over the competitors.’ He said that BPC’s lack of experience in the US market was not an issue. On the contrary, he observed that international companies tend to have ‘a broader view of technology and characteristics’. He cited the EMV functionality as an example: many US-centric vendors do not support it, while most of their international counterparts do. The work was being carried out jointly by EFX and BPC,
with the latter supplying a local project manager. Specialists from BPC’s development centre were brought in from Russia to assist with the installation, configuration, go-live and user training. BPC’s local team at this time comprised four people covering sales, pre/post sales and project management. The development resources were located in Russia as it offers ‘a huge pool of highly-skilled engineers’, explained Richard Phillimore, BPC’s executive vice president. ‘The opportunities in the US are enormous, yet it is a very difficult market to enter,’ he stated. BPC planned to initially target the small and mid- sized sectors, but with top-tier entities on the agenda in the long run. ‘The SmartVista suite is a very credible alternative for banks looking to replace the Base24 payment system from ACI Worldwide,’ claimed Phillimore. He felt banks around the world were looking for alternatives following ACI’s announcement that it was gradually winding down its classic Base24 solution
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