Corporate Overview
Clear2Pay was set up in September 2001 with start-up capital. Co-founder and CEO, Michel Akkermans, previously founded a Belgian regulatory reporting company, FICS, which was subsequently sold to S1. The other co-founder, Jürgen Ingels, is ex-Dexia, where he specialised in helping start-ups. Unlike FICS, which grew organically, Clear2Pay had an acquisitive strategy
from an early stage. Its first breakthrough came in the middle of 2002 when its emerging PayPark solution was acquired by Visa. The emphasis for that project was card-to-card payments, with the offering subsequently broadened for other forms of person-to-person (P2P) money transfer.
There have been other capital injections (one of which saw Intel take a minority stake) and a sequence of acquisitions (see below) which brought an e-business transaction platform (with Tectrade NV); cash management solution (with Maxware in the Netherlands); 3-D secure certified products for acquirers and issuers (with Element NV); and the Bank Payment Hub and an Asia Pacific presence with Sienna Technologies, with others added since then. Sienna was particularly important as its product is at the heart of Clear2Pay's suite.
By the start of 2011 it had over 500 staff, of which around 110 were in China (where it had made two acquisitions). Less than one year later, the headcount figure had doubled, in part through the acquisition of UK-based ATM testing automation firm, Level Four, and US/India-based card and payments consulting firm, ISTS. Ownership of Clear2Pay is spread across a range of
investment companies, plus the senior management.
Summary History
2001 September: Company founded.
2002: Wins first major deal, from Visa, for a card-to-card solution based on its emerging PayPark system.
2004 May: Clear2Pay acquires Australian company, Sienna Technologies, and its Bank Payment Hub (BPH). This Java-based offering comes to form the main payment platform from the Belgian supplier. It was stated that Sienna's payments products would complement Clear2Pay's 'next generation payment processing platform, PayPark'. The Sienna products would enhance
PayPark with components to service the full range of retail, SME, corporate and institutional clients.As a result, the Clear2Pay solutions would broaden the coverage of the full financial value chain from initiation to settlement for high-value as well as low-value payments for both domestic and cross-border transactions.
Sienna's users in Australia included National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ, St George Bank and Reserve Bank of Australia. Asian customers included BCS in Singapore and Krung Thai Computer Services (KCS), part of Krung Thai Group in Thailand. Sienna was set up almost ten years earlier and was backed by Technology Venture Partners (TVP), the largest specialist technology venture capital firm in Australia.
2005 November: Clear2Pay opens a first US office as it starts to make headway in north America. It claims at this time to be working with one large US bank that had entered a pilot phase with PayPark to support payments between the US and Mexico, and two other projects in the US with small 'community groups'.
2006: Unisys selects Clear2Pay to underpin its Open Payments Platform (OPP). OPP is intended to be based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and J2EE, with Unisys settling on a buy versus build route at an early stage.
2007: IBM announces its Enterprise Payments Platform (EPP), its Websphere and DB2-based, SOA-centric payments strategy. Clear2Pay is one of the companies cited as a partner for this.
2007: In China, Clear2Pay buys an 85-person payments company, Data House. There is a network called CNAPS to which banks in the country must connect for international payments and cheque image exchange. Data House provided connectivity to this, with customers spanning both domestic players and the Chinese operations of overseas banks, such as Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas.
2007 November: Clear2Pay buys Integri, a Belgian supplier of test tools and test services for payments, ticketing and mobile applications.
Mid-2009: Unisys ties up with Dovetail as its main OPP partner, seemingly reversing the decision to go with Clear2Pay. The two companies gained a high profile win in the first half of 2007 with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland for a cheque and image processing system for itself and eleven other US federal reserve banks. Rein Geerdes, Unisys' business development head, payments solutions and services, said only that Unisys was still available as a system integrator for Clear2Pay projects.Unisys undertook a thorough investigation before making the decision, said Geerdes. It felt Dovetail's single platform and architecture was superior to all of its competitors. In addition, Dovetail's focus on being a development shop meant it complemented Unisys' systems integration and services skills.
November 2011: Clear2Pay acquires UK-based ATM testing automation software company, Level Four, and US/India-based card and payment consulting company, ISTS.
Product Suite
The Bank Payment Hub (BPH) was derived from the aforementioned Australian company, Sienna Technologies, acquired by Clear2Pay in 2004. This Java-based payment engine forms the core of Clear2Pay's suite, now dubbed the Open Payment Framework (OPF). Akkermans said the J2EE-based solution had been 'built from the ground up' and this seemed a reasonable claim. Clear2Pay had then been able to use significant venture capital investment to broaden and deepen the offering.
BPH is a centralised payments infrastructure spanning customer interaction, order management and payment execution. It supports SEPA, international payments, billing and bill payment routing, cheque processing, low-value and high-value payments. There is a component for cheque image processing.For cheque image clearing, Clear2Pay had an early solution but this has been replaced by the BPH component. A couple of US banks use OPF in this domain, so too Bank of Thailand (see below). Using what head of Asia Pacific, Warren Gardiner, describe as the 'precursor to OPF', Clear2Pay also provided the cheque image processing platform for Singapore a few years
earlier. Gardiner was one of the co-founders of Sienna Technologies.
A version of BPH/OPF is positioned for corporates as the Corporate Payment Hub (CPH). It centralises and standardises payment processing and, via workflow, also enables subsidiaries to perform their payment activities. It is meant to allow corporates to eliminate the use of multiple local electronic banking systems and standardises bank interfaces without the need to
adopt bank specific software and standards.
There is a Software Development Kit (SDK) within OPF. This allows customers to add and change components. There are also the Integri-derived testing tools for payment, smartcard and mobile solutions.Clear2Pay also has a Chargeback (CBK) reporting package for management of credit and debit card disputed transactions. This provides a single interface for both issuer and acquirer activity, covering exception processing problems related to disputed transactions or customer claims. Via Sienna, there is also an electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) solution, BillView
Integrator.
There is an e-banking solution, stemming from the Diagram acquisition. Now called the OPF eBanking suite, it is intended to cover both corporate and retail banking for internet, mobile, interactive voice, branch banking and on-line trading. Reflecting the French roots of Diagram, it is mainly used in France and French-speaking Africa.
This is sold on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis as B-Web and is largely used in Africa. One user with B-Web is Bank of Africa, one of the largest banks on the continent, servicing over 700,000 accounts, albeit with a much smaller number of internet banking customers to date. It signed in late 2009 and uses it across multiple countries.
There are two products on the card side. ProxyPay3/M is a platform for processing online payment transactions. As a front-end between the internet or POS servers and the systems of an acquirer, it is used for e-payment transaction validation and processing. ClearPark is a pan-European online payment and settlement solution for acquirers, built in an ASP model. ClearPark allows merchants to accept worldwide electronic payments for transactions using Visa, MasterCard and Amex cards as well local bank paybuttons, from a call centre, a web shop, via web forms, in batch processing mode or through a direct connection to a back-end system.
Clear2Pay was set up in September 2001 with start-up capital. Co-founder and CEO, Michel Akkermans, previously founded a Belgian regulatory reporting company, FICS, which was subsequently sold to S1. The other co-founder, Jürgen Ingels, is ex-Dexia, where he specialised in helping start-ups. Unlike FICS, which grew organically, Clear2Pay had an acquisitive strategy
from an early stage. Its first breakthrough came in the middle of 2002 when its emerging PayPark solution was acquired by Visa. The emphasis for that project was card-to-card payments, with the offering subsequently broadened for other forms of person-to-person (P2P) money transfer.
There have been other capital injections (one of which saw Intel take a minority stake) and a sequence of acquisitions (see below) which brought an e-business transaction platform (with Tectrade NV); cash management solution (with Maxware in the Netherlands); 3-D secure certified products for acquirers and issuers (with Element NV); and the Bank Payment Hub and an Asia Pacific presence with Sienna Technologies, with others added since then. Sienna was particularly important as its product is at the heart of Clear2Pay's suite.
By the start of 2011 it had over 500 staff, of which around 110 were in China (where it had made two acquisitions). Less than one year later, the headcount figure had doubled, in part through the acquisition of UK-based ATM testing automation firm, Level Four, and US/India-based card and payments consulting firm, ISTS. Ownership of Clear2Pay is spread across a range of
investment companies, plus the senior management.
Summary History
2001 September: Company founded.
2002: Wins first major deal, from Visa, for a card-to-card solution based on its emerging PayPark system.
2004 May: Clear2Pay acquires Australian company, Sienna Technologies, and its Bank Payment Hub (BPH). This Java-based offering comes to form the main payment platform from the Belgian supplier. It was stated that Sienna's payments products would complement Clear2Pay's 'next generation payment processing platform, PayPark'. The Sienna products would enhance
PayPark with components to service the full range of retail, SME, corporate and institutional clients.As a result, the Clear2Pay solutions would broaden the coverage of the full financial value chain from initiation to settlement for high-value as well as low-value payments for both domestic and cross-border transactions.
Sienna's users in Australia included National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ, St George Bank and Reserve Bank of Australia. Asian customers included BCS in Singapore and Krung Thai Computer Services (KCS), part of Krung Thai Group in Thailand. Sienna was set up almost ten years earlier and was backed by Technology Venture Partners (TVP), the largest specialist technology venture capital firm in Australia.
2005 November: Clear2Pay opens a first US office as it starts to make headway in north America. It claims at this time to be working with one large US bank that had entered a pilot phase with PayPark to support payments between the US and Mexico, and two other projects in the US with small 'community groups'.
2006: Unisys selects Clear2Pay to underpin its Open Payments Platform (OPP). OPP is intended to be based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and J2EE, with Unisys settling on a buy versus build route at an early stage.
2007: IBM announces its Enterprise Payments Platform (EPP), its Websphere and DB2-based, SOA-centric payments strategy. Clear2Pay is one of the companies cited as a partner for this.
2007: In China, Clear2Pay buys an 85-person payments company, Data House. There is a network called CNAPS to which banks in the country must connect for international payments and cheque image exchange. Data House provided connectivity to this, with customers spanning both domestic players and the Chinese operations of overseas banks, such as Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas.
2007 November: Clear2Pay buys Integri, a Belgian supplier of test tools and test services for payments, ticketing and mobile applications.
Mid-2009: Unisys ties up with Dovetail as its main OPP partner, seemingly reversing the decision to go with Clear2Pay. The two companies gained a high profile win in the first half of 2007 with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland for a cheque and image processing system for itself and eleven other US federal reserve banks. Rein Geerdes, Unisys' business development head, payments solutions and services, said only that Unisys was still available as a system integrator for Clear2Pay projects.Unisys undertook a thorough investigation before making the decision, said Geerdes. It felt Dovetail's single platform and architecture was superior to all of its competitors. In addition, Dovetail's focus on being a development shop meant it complemented Unisys' systems integration and services skills.
November 2011: Clear2Pay acquires UK-based ATM testing automation software company, Level Four, and US/India-based card and payment consulting company, ISTS.
Product Suite
The Bank Payment Hub (BPH) was derived from the aforementioned Australian company, Sienna Technologies, acquired by Clear2Pay in 2004. This Java-based payment engine forms the core of Clear2Pay's suite, now dubbed the Open Payment Framework (OPF). Akkermans said the J2EE-based solution had been 'built from the ground up' and this seemed a reasonable claim. Clear2Pay had then been able to use significant venture capital investment to broaden and deepen the offering.
BPH is a centralised payments infrastructure spanning customer interaction, order management and payment execution. It supports SEPA, international payments, billing and bill payment routing, cheque processing, low-value and high-value payments. There is a component for cheque image processing.For cheque image clearing, Clear2Pay had an early solution but this has been replaced by the BPH component. A couple of US banks use OPF in this domain, so too Bank of Thailand (see below). Using what head of Asia Pacific, Warren Gardiner, describe as the 'precursor to OPF', Clear2Pay also provided the cheque image processing platform for Singapore a few years
earlier. Gardiner was one of the co-founders of Sienna Technologies.
A version of BPH/OPF is positioned for corporates as the Corporate Payment Hub (CPH). It centralises and standardises payment processing and, via workflow, also enables subsidiaries to perform their payment activities. It is meant to allow corporates to eliminate the use of multiple local electronic banking systems and standardises bank interfaces without the need to
adopt bank specific software and standards.
There is a Software Development Kit (SDK) within OPF. This allows customers to add and change components. There are also the Integri-derived testing tools for payment, smartcard and mobile solutions.Clear2Pay also has a Chargeback (CBK) reporting package for management of credit and debit card disputed transactions. This provides a single interface for both issuer and acquirer activity, covering exception processing problems related to disputed transactions or customer claims. Via Sienna, there is also an electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) solution, BillView
Integrator.
There is an e-banking solution, stemming from the Diagram acquisition. Now called the OPF eBanking suite, it is intended to cover both corporate and retail banking for internet, mobile, interactive voice, branch banking and on-line trading. Reflecting the French roots of Diagram, it is mainly used in France and French-speaking Africa.
This is sold on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis as B-Web and is largely used in Africa. One user with B-Web is Bank of Africa, one of the largest banks on the continent, servicing over 700,000 accounts, albeit with a much smaller number of internet banking customers to date. It signed in late 2009 and uses it across multiple countries.
There are two products on the card side. ProxyPay3/M is a platform for processing online payment transactions. As a front-end between the internet or POS servers and the systems of an acquirer, it is used for e-payment transaction validation and processing. ClearPark is a pan-European online payment and settlement solution for acquirers, built in an ASP model. ClearPark allows merchants to accept worldwide electronic payments for transactions using Visa, MasterCard and Amex cards as well local bank paybuttons, from a call centre, a web shop, via web forms, in batch processing mode or through a direct connection to a back-end system.
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