Overview
BPC and its SmartVista payments suite have a strong Russian and CIS focus but have made considerable strides beyond here as well. The offering is broad, with a retail slant, and can be taken in its entirety or on a modular basis. It is not as new as some, having been developed over the last decade, but is newer than most. The company is officially based in the Netherlands; a key
target is replacements of ACI’s Base24.
Payments products:
SmartVista Suite, incorporating: SmartSwitch, SmartIssuer, SmartPro, SmartATM, SmartMerchant, SmartLoyalty, SmartBilling, SmartGuard
Summary History
• 1995 – Set up in Moscow to provide services and software to Russia's banking community.
• 1998 – Having worked with third party solutions, BPC commences development of its payments suite.
• 2008 – Opens an office in the UK.
• 2008 – December Claims full SEPA compliance for its suite.
• 2009 – August Gains first taker in the EU, Banca Transilvania.
• 2010 – Opens an office in the US and gains a first customer before the end of the year, EFX Corp.
• 2011 – Gains customer in Central Europe, Panama-based Telered.
Corporate Overview
A large portion of BPC's clients are in Russia and CIS countries, although the company has expanded into Western Europe, Asia Pacific, South Africa plus Latin and North America of late. The company is part of the BPC Group which has interests in financial services, energy and chemicals.
Founded in 1995 as Banking Production Centre, today BPC provides e-payment solutions for the global financial industry, based around the SmartVista Suite. SmartVista can be used by the various types of organisation that need to process cards: retail banks with in-house card processing, organisations providing Member Service Provider/Third Party Processor (MSP/TPP)
services to smaller banks or merchant processors, and the suite can be used to underpin national or international payment networks.
BPC has around 200 employees in Russia and a sales, marketing and support presence in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and US. The company has offices in the Netherlands, Singapore, UAE, UK, Ukraine and US. In addition, the company has a network of business partners, including relationships with IBM, HP, Oracle, Visa and MasterCard. While it is largely focused
on its own products, it has acted as a partner in Russia for outside companies, including Financial Network Services (FNS) and its Bancs core banking system (now owned by TCS Financial Solutions) within a tie-up signed in 2004. It claimed 19 new-name customers in 2010 and record revenues, showing an increase of 39 per cent on the previous year.
Product Suite
The SmartVista Suite was developed in the second half of the 1990s. BPC wanted to bring to market a new solution for EFT and payment processing. The aim was to use the latest technology to provide a payments solution that was easy to implement and had the flexibility to allow banks and card processors to be able to rapidly develop new services around cards. To a degree, it has benefited from its roots in a relatively sophisticated market when it comes to self-service devices. Standard ATM facilities for instance in Russia include cash in, on-line funds transfer, bill payment including links to utilities, customisable screens, and person-to-person payments including via Western Union.
As a modular solution, SmartVista can be implemented to provide an end-to-end payments solution, or can provide the frontend,operating alongside a legacy back office card management environment. It runs on Unix (IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris) plus IBM iSeries, Windows and Linux. In October 2010, a port of the switch part of the suite to HP's Tandem-derived Integrity NonStop platform was announced to target legacy system users running this platform. At a database level, SmartVista supports Oracle and IBM DB2. It was originally written in C and C++, with a switch to J2EE from around 2007.
The system supports interfaces to multiple hosts and core banking systems, both online and offline, so it can transmit financial messages and carry out mapping for interbank settlements. It can act as a switch solution to receive, analyse, transform and route financial messages. Interfaces are available to major international and local payment schemes, such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club.
The SmartVista Suite can be employed for a specific element of the payment processing value chain: from a third party POS concentrator or merchant processor to a retail chain that uses private label loyalty cards as a customer retention tool. It can be used to handle Switch, agent organisation processing, MSP/TPP processing, national payment networks, merchant processors or
as a payment gateway.
SmartVista can handle transfers between customers' accounts and virtual money systems through direct protocols or an interface to a third party payment gateway. Such a solution was developed for the Russian Development Bank, RBR Bank, as an online interface to the Yandex e-money system in Russia, through the ePay protocol. This functionality allows customers to link a virtual money wallet with their personal account and perform online transactions to replenish the virtual wallet or make a
withdrawal via an ATM.
The SmartVista Front-End system takes care of all online, real-time interactions and activities required to provide authorisation processing and transaction switching on both the issuer and acquirer sides. Typically all transaction origination devices, online payment scheme interfaces, online host interfaces plus internet, wireless and any online interfaces are processed.
The key functional areas supported by SmartVista Front-End include: Authorisation request capture, processing and routing; stand-in, host and serial multi-host authorisation; ATM and POS network management and monitoring, including support for multi-functional self-service kiosks; online transaction monitoring, using rule-based or statistics models to detect fraudulent
transactions.
The SmartVista Back-Office system provides facilities for offline clearing and settlement with counterparties and payment networks; customer, card and merchant management; interfacing to core banking and other IT systems; and for reporting, both internal and external.
Specifically, it handles: Customer, card and merchant management, including fees, rates and limits set-up; clearing and settlement of financial transactions; dispute, charge-back and exception processing; fraud reporting and risk management; operational accounting (GL accounts maintenance) and reporting; credit card support; value-added services, such as co-brand cards, loyalty and affinity schemes.
SmartVista CardGen is a card issuance solution designed for magnetic stripe and chip (EMV) card personalisation, including tracks and embossing data preparation, chip personalisation data preparation and security management procedures.
SmartVista Fraud Prevention and Monitoring is a business intelligence solution combining fraud detection technology with realtime transaction monitoring to support the prediction, detection, prevention and blocking of fraudulent activities. The solution provides a set of mechanisms, from transaction filtering to user-defined rules technology and neural network-based monitoring,
to help organisations reduce losses due to lost, stolen, counterfeit or skimmed, 'never received' and other types of card fraud. It combines on-line and off-line fraud detection models and enables both card issuers and acquirers to track transactions coming from traditional and emerging delivery channels such as ATMs, POS and internet.
SmartVista i-Card supports additional functionality for internet acquiring realised on the base of 3D-Secure technology. It allows the issuing bank to ensure customer authentication while processing internet purchase operations by checking a predefined set of cardholder parameters.
SmartVista i-Pay provides internet acquiring of international payment cards for internet merchants, with certification by Visa and MasterCard. The payment operations are authorised in an on-line mode. There is support for cardholder authentication including Verified By Visa/3D-Secure for Visa Network, UCAF/SecureCode for MasterCard Network schemes and an antifraud
system for transaction filtering.
SmartVista i-Pay allows acquiring banks to provide internet shops with the opportunity to authorise purchases, receive confirmations, fulfil transactions and transfer information on the operation to the acquiring bank. The system also supports purchase return and refund functions.
Strategy
In terms of functionality, one area of activity at BPC is around virtual wallets, where it has been working with an un-named bank in Singapore. It is also looking into developing contactless technology with clients in Vietnam. It has aggressively sought to add to its headcount and user base across the globe and is now active on most continents. In part, this is through targeting replacements of ACI’s Base24. As a reflection of its seriousness, it made senior appointments in the first half of 2011 in Latin America (a new SVP of sales, based in Mexico), the US (a new MD) and Middle East (a new business development manager). One thing the recruits had in common was that they were all ex-ACI.
BPC and its SmartVista payments suite have a strong Russian and CIS focus but have made considerable strides beyond here as well. The offering is broad, with a retail slant, and can be taken in its entirety or on a modular basis. It is not as new as some, having been developed over the last decade, but is newer than most. The company is officially based in the Netherlands; a key
target is replacements of ACI’s Base24.
Payments products:
SmartVista Suite, incorporating: SmartSwitch, SmartIssuer, SmartPro, SmartATM, SmartMerchant, SmartLoyalty, SmartBilling, SmartGuard
Summary History
• 1995 – Set up in Moscow to provide services and software to Russia's banking community.
• 1998 – Having worked with third party solutions, BPC commences development of its payments suite.
• 2008 – Opens an office in the UK.
• 2008 – December Claims full SEPA compliance for its suite.
• 2009 – August Gains first taker in the EU, Banca Transilvania.
• 2010 – Opens an office in the US and gains a first customer before the end of the year, EFX Corp.
• 2011 – Gains customer in Central Europe, Panama-based Telered.
Corporate Overview
A large portion of BPC's clients are in Russia and CIS countries, although the company has expanded into Western Europe, Asia Pacific, South Africa plus Latin and North America of late. The company is part of the BPC Group which has interests in financial services, energy and chemicals.
Founded in 1995 as Banking Production Centre, today BPC provides e-payment solutions for the global financial industry, based around the SmartVista Suite. SmartVista can be used by the various types of organisation that need to process cards: retail banks with in-house card processing, organisations providing Member Service Provider/Third Party Processor (MSP/TPP)
services to smaller banks or merchant processors, and the suite can be used to underpin national or international payment networks.
BPC has around 200 employees in Russia and a sales, marketing and support presence in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and US. The company has offices in the Netherlands, Singapore, UAE, UK, Ukraine and US. In addition, the company has a network of business partners, including relationships with IBM, HP, Oracle, Visa and MasterCard. While it is largely focused
on its own products, it has acted as a partner in Russia for outside companies, including Financial Network Services (FNS) and its Bancs core banking system (now owned by TCS Financial Solutions) within a tie-up signed in 2004. It claimed 19 new-name customers in 2010 and record revenues, showing an increase of 39 per cent on the previous year.
Product Suite
The SmartVista Suite was developed in the second half of the 1990s. BPC wanted to bring to market a new solution for EFT and payment processing. The aim was to use the latest technology to provide a payments solution that was easy to implement and had the flexibility to allow banks and card processors to be able to rapidly develop new services around cards. To a degree, it has benefited from its roots in a relatively sophisticated market when it comes to self-service devices. Standard ATM facilities for instance in Russia include cash in, on-line funds transfer, bill payment including links to utilities, customisable screens, and person-to-person payments including via Western Union.
As a modular solution, SmartVista can be implemented to provide an end-to-end payments solution, or can provide the frontend,operating alongside a legacy back office card management environment. It runs on Unix (IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris) plus IBM iSeries, Windows and Linux. In October 2010, a port of the switch part of the suite to HP's Tandem-derived Integrity NonStop platform was announced to target legacy system users running this platform. At a database level, SmartVista supports Oracle and IBM DB2. It was originally written in C and C++, with a switch to J2EE from around 2007.
The system supports interfaces to multiple hosts and core banking systems, both online and offline, so it can transmit financial messages and carry out mapping for interbank settlements. It can act as a switch solution to receive, analyse, transform and route financial messages. Interfaces are available to major international and local payment schemes, such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club.
The SmartVista Suite can be employed for a specific element of the payment processing value chain: from a third party POS concentrator or merchant processor to a retail chain that uses private label loyalty cards as a customer retention tool. It can be used to handle Switch, agent organisation processing, MSP/TPP processing, national payment networks, merchant processors or
as a payment gateway.
SmartVista can handle transfers between customers' accounts and virtual money systems through direct protocols or an interface to a third party payment gateway. Such a solution was developed for the Russian Development Bank, RBR Bank, as an online interface to the Yandex e-money system in Russia, through the ePay protocol. This functionality allows customers to link a virtual money wallet with their personal account and perform online transactions to replenish the virtual wallet or make a
withdrawal via an ATM.
The SmartVista Front-End system takes care of all online, real-time interactions and activities required to provide authorisation processing and transaction switching on both the issuer and acquirer sides. Typically all transaction origination devices, online payment scheme interfaces, online host interfaces plus internet, wireless and any online interfaces are processed.
The key functional areas supported by SmartVista Front-End include: Authorisation request capture, processing and routing; stand-in, host and serial multi-host authorisation; ATM and POS network management and monitoring, including support for multi-functional self-service kiosks; online transaction monitoring, using rule-based or statistics models to detect fraudulent
transactions.
The SmartVista Back-Office system provides facilities for offline clearing and settlement with counterparties and payment networks; customer, card and merchant management; interfacing to core banking and other IT systems; and for reporting, both internal and external.
Specifically, it handles: Customer, card and merchant management, including fees, rates and limits set-up; clearing and settlement of financial transactions; dispute, charge-back and exception processing; fraud reporting and risk management; operational accounting (GL accounts maintenance) and reporting; credit card support; value-added services, such as co-brand cards, loyalty and affinity schemes.
SmartVista CardGen is a card issuance solution designed for magnetic stripe and chip (EMV) card personalisation, including tracks and embossing data preparation, chip personalisation data preparation and security management procedures.
SmartVista Fraud Prevention and Monitoring is a business intelligence solution combining fraud detection technology with realtime transaction monitoring to support the prediction, detection, prevention and blocking of fraudulent activities. The solution provides a set of mechanisms, from transaction filtering to user-defined rules technology and neural network-based monitoring,
to help organisations reduce losses due to lost, stolen, counterfeit or skimmed, 'never received' and other types of card fraud. It combines on-line and off-line fraud detection models and enables both card issuers and acquirers to track transactions coming from traditional and emerging delivery channels such as ATMs, POS and internet.
SmartVista i-Card supports additional functionality for internet acquiring realised on the base of 3D-Secure technology. It allows the issuing bank to ensure customer authentication while processing internet purchase operations by checking a predefined set of cardholder parameters.
SmartVista i-Pay provides internet acquiring of international payment cards for internet merchants, with certification by Visa and MasterCard. The payment operations are authorised in an on-line mode. There is support for cardholder authentication including Verified By Visa/3D-Secure for Visa Network, UCAF/SecureCode for MasterCard Network schemes and an antifraud
system for transaction filtering.
SmartVista i-Pay allows acquiring banks to provide internet shops with the opportunity to authorise purchases, receive confirmations, fulfil transactions and transfer information on the operation to the acquiring bank. The system also supports purchase return and refund functions.
Strategy
In terms of functionality, one area of activity at BPC is around virtual wallets, where it has been working with an un-named bank in Singapore. It is also looking into developing contactless technology with clients in Vietnam. It has aggressively sought to add to its headcount and user base across the globe and is now active on most continents. In part, this is through targeting replacements of ACI’s Base24. As a reflection of its seriousness, it made senior appointments in the first half of 2011 in Latin America (a new SVP of sales, based in Mexico), the US (a new MD) and Middle East (a new business development manager). One thing the recruits had in common was that they were all ex-ACI.
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