Overview
CSC has a payments engine which was developed in Germany. Most users to date are based here but the solution has been tailored for a number of European countries over the last few years through work with Commerzbank. CSC also has a long established card management system, traditionally sold as CAMS II.
Corporate Overview
Computer Sciences Corporation was founded in 1959, as an IT services firm from the start. Much of its early work was for the public sector but it moved into financial services in the 1960s, developing a payroll system and a tax return system. Skipping to the 1990s, CSC acquired Ploenzke AG, a German computer services firm, in 1994, and then Continuum, owner of Hogan Systems Inc, in 1996. The former would start developing a payment processing system, PTS, about five years later, and the
latter brought the Hogan core banking solution. CSC has now grown to over 90,000 employees worldwide.
Summary History
1959 – CSC founded
1994 – Ploenzke acquired
1996 – Continuum acquired
2001 – Development started on PTS
2008 – Commerzbank takes SEPA Direct Debits solution from CSC, and continues country roll-out of PTS
Product Suite
The offering, PTS, was originally written in Smalltalk and is platform independent. The development kicked off in 2001. It came out of CSC's German business unit, CSC Ploenzke, inspired by the belief that banks would need to overhaul their legacy payment infrastructures, something that was borne out with the emergence of SEPA.
The solution has seen good take-up in Germany, with CSC claiming around 70 banks as users. One notable recruit has been Crédit Mutuel (formerly Citibank) for its German retail business at Targobank. A SEPA module was added, with seven banks going live with this for the January 2008 arrival of SEPA Credit Transfers (Commerzbank was among those to do so with this, within a project which went 'very smoothly', according to the bank's head of international payments, Horst Rinkenberger).
The payments system clearly resides within a large parent company with global reach and some other potentially complementary applications (such as its cards processing system). However, CSC is not renowned for its software sales and PTS does not yet have a high profile outside Germany. The intention is to rectify this and to use the continued SEPA wave in particular to push the system beyond Germany. CSC was apparently in contact with one or two UK banks on this front.
PTS is run by a separate 'competency group' within the financial services part of CSC. About 30 people work on the system, some of which are consultants who also work on other areas. The full-time team of 15 people is headed by Thomas Riedel.
PTS is a standardised modular application for processing payments transactions – domestic and cross-border, mass payments and high-value payments. It sits between a bank's core accounting system(s) and the bank's various gateways. It handles all payment processes including formatting, validating, routing, accounting and charging.
PTS allows banks to select routing strategies for payments, according to settlement instructions and bilateral/multilateral agreements including internal routing (multi-branching), bilateral relationships (correspondents) and selection of ACHs (clearing).
PTS provides a many-to-many connection for both incoming and outgoing payment messages. Each core accounting system has one connection for all payment gateways and each payment gateway has one connection for all core accounting systems.
A single instance of PTS can support all the operations of a bank, according to CSC (within and across national borders) as well as catering for in-sourced payment services from other financial institutions. PTS supports full separation of information between operating units and financial institutions.
PTS supports DB2 and Oracle 11g at the database level, with Windows/Unix/z/OS host. It is written in Cobol, Java and Smalltalk (the roadmap is to upgrade to Java) and it has a thin client user interface.
CSC's card and merchant processing system, CAMS II (now part of the vendor's Celeriti suite), has clients such as Equens, Barclaycard, MasterCard and SiNSYS. It is multi-language, multi-currency and multi-operator. It has traditionally been aimed at the top end of the market, with the benchmark tests showing support for 100 million active cardholder accounts, be they credit, debit or prepaid at rates in excess of 3000 transactions per second. CSC has been working to make the offering more
attractive to tier two banks, as opposed to the tier one outfits it was built for.
This decision followed an internal analysis which showed that around 70 per cent of the opportunities for CAMS II had been from small and medium sized banks. This particularly meant working to reduce implementation times. Meanwhile, work was also done to make the offering SOA-enabled. Malcolm Cressey, business consultant at CSC, suggested that this process would
be complete early in 2012.
The CAMS II/Celeriti Cards & Merchants system supports DB2 on z/OS or Linux on the mainframe, fully distributed Linux, Unix and Windows.
It constitutes a core issuing and acquiring system, handling all types of payment cards. The system's functionality includes product definition, pricing and business strategies, operational procedures, relationship management and processing efficiency.
CSC has a payments engine which was developed in Germany. Most users to date are based here but the solution has been tailored for a number of European countries over the last few years through work with Commerzbank. CSC also has a long established card management system, traditionally sold as CAMS II.
Corporate Overview
Computer Sciences Corporation was founded in 1959, as an IT services firm from the start. Much of its early work was for the public sector but it moved into financial services in the 1960s, developing a payroll system and a tax return system. Skipping to the 1990s, CSC acquired Ploenzke AG, a German computer services firm, in 1994, and then Continuum, owner of Hogan Systems Inc, in 1996. The former would start developing a payment processing system, PTS, about five years later, and the
latter brought the Hogan core banking solution. CSC has now grown to over 90,000 employees worldwide.
Summary History
1959 – CSC founded
1994 – Ploenzke acquired
1996 – Continuum acquired
2001 – Development started on PTS
2008 – Commerzbank takes SEPA Direct Debits solution from CSC, and continues country roll-out of PTS
Product Suite
The offering, PTS, was originally written in Smalltalk and is platform independent. The development kicked off in 2001. It came out of CSC's German business unit, CSC Ploenzke, inspired by the belief that banks would need to overhaul their legacy payment infrastructures, something that was borne out with the emergence of SEPA.
The solution has seen good take-up in Germany, with CSC claiming around 70 banks as users. One notable recruit has been Crédit Mutuel (formerly Citibank) for its German retail business at Targobank. A SEPA module was added, with seven banks going live with this for the January 2008 arrival of SEPA Credit Transfers (Commerzbank was among those to do so with this, within a project which went 'very smoothly', according to the bank's head of international payments, Horst Rinkenberger).
The payments system clearly resides within a large parent company with global reach and some other potentially complementary applications (such as its cards processing system). However, CSC is not renowned for its software sales and PTS does not yet have a high profile outside Germany. The intention is to rectify this and to use the continued SEPA wave in particular to push the system beyond Germany. CSC was apparently in contact with one or two UK banks on this front.
PTS is run by a separate 'competency group' within the financial services part of CSC. About 30 people work on the system, some of which are consultants who also work on other areas. The full-time team of 15 people is headed by Thomas Riedel.
PTS is a standardised modular application for processing payments transactions – domestic and cross-border, mass payments and high-value payments. It sits between a bank's core accounting system(s) and the bank's various gateways. It handles all payment processes including formatting, validating, routing, accounting and charging.
PTS allows banks to select routing strategies for payments, according to settlement instructions and bilateral/multilateral agreements including internal routing (multi-branching), bilateral relationships (correspondents) and selection of ACHs (clearing).
PTS provides a many-to-many connection for both incoming and outgoing payment messages. Each core accounting system has one connection for all payment gateways and each payment gateway has one connection for all core accounting systems.
A single instance of PTS can support all the operations of a bank, according to CSC (within and across national borders) as well as catering for in-sourced payment services from other financial institutions. PTS supports full separation of information between operating units and financial institutions.
PTS supports DB2 and Oracle 11g at the database level, with Windows/Unix/z/OS host. It is written in Cobol, Java and Smalltalk (the roadmap is to upgrade to Java) and it has a thin client user interface.
CSC's card and merchant processing system, CAMS II (now part of the vendor's Celeriti suite), has clients such as Equens, Barclaycard, MasterCard and SiNSYS. It is multi-language, multi-currency and multi-operator. It has traditionally been aimed at the top end of the market, with the benchmark tests showing support for 100 million active cardholder accounts, be they credit, debit or prepaid at rates in excess of 3000 transactions per second. CSC has been working to make the offering more
attractive to tier two banks, as opposed to the tier one outfits it was built for.
This decision followed an internal analysis which showed that around 70 per cent of the opportunities for CAMS II had been from small and medium sized banks. This particularly meant working to reduce implementation times. Meanwhile, work was also done to make the offering SOA-enabled. Malcolm Cressey, business consultant at CSC, suggested that this process would
be complete early in 2012.
The CAMS II/Celeriti Cards & Merchants system supports DB2 on z/OS or Linux on the mainframe, fully distributed Linux, Unix and Windows.
It constitutes a core issuing and acquiring system, handling all types of payment cards. The system's functionality includes product definition, pricing and business strategies, operational procedures, relationship management and processing efficiency.
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