Month: November 2010

November is the month we add another year to our presence in the financial scenery. Business Information Systems is now 12 years old.

We started out as a handful of people, most of them being the founders, in a small Bucharest office. Almost all of them are still with BIS today, having built a valuable team of more than 50 people. The company’s target market was chosen upfront: banking and financial instutions industry.

A lot has been invested in training and certifying team members, earning internationally certifications worthy not only of our hall of fame, but also of direct interest to our customers. Thus, by 2007, we gathered on the SWIFT front alone certified competences on TARGET2, Cash Reporting, SEPA – Bulk Payments, Trade Services, Corporate, Funds, SWIFTAlliance RMA. Also, we have technical personnel certified on Tivoli, Euclid, Microsoft, IBM, ORACLE products and suites.

At company level, we achieved IS 9001 quality management system certificate and renewed it every 2 years for the past decade. We’ve also been struggling for 3 years now with reaching CMMI level 2 compliance, and we eventually have and are now aiming for CMMI level 3 in the upcoming years.

In 2003 we created the first version of our payment hub, qPayIntegrator, implementing it at 6 banks in the following year. Then after we’ve continuously improved both customer support services and this product, adding new features and modules as required by our customers or as designed by us. These include processing facilities for low and high value payments, direct debit, debit instruments, SEPA, workers’ remittances and features for accounts reconciliation, duplicate detection, AML, liquidity reporting, multi-currency, competitive reporting. This year we’ve launched the version “as a service” of this payment hub, PAYaaS.

Since 2008 we’ve exhibited at every Sibos, breaking the ice on the international market. Organizing and publicly speaking at conferences both in Bucharest and at the financial community’s biggest event created awareness of our name, solution and services portfolio.

So these are, very briefly, the 12 years of Business Information Systems’ life. For the near future we plan finishing the long rebranding process we’ve embarked on, thus becoming Allevo, exhibiting again at EBADay and Sibos Toronto, releasing the complete version of qPayIntegrator as a Service and taking new challenges and opportunities as the unroll.

After having a ten year continuous presence as simple participants at Sibos (minus the one which was last minute cancelled), time has come for us to finally step forward and place ourselves one level higher.

Thus for the last three years in a row we’ve joined this exclusive event as exhibitors, focusing more on value and quality, rather than trying to compete with this industry’s giants. And we think it worked, judging by the return upon investment we’ve seen.

Three years bringing us new partners, new customers, new valuable contacts, opening new doors and opportunities and last, but not least, finding ourselves a well deserved spot in this financial community.

Business Information Systems exhibitor at Sibos:

2008 Vienna

2009 Hong Kong

2010 Amsterdam

After a hectic week in Amsterdam where days were starting much too early in the morning and ending only a few hours away from the following sunrise, we’re finally back in Bucharest, enjoying the cold and dump Dutch weather that was awaiting us here.

This is the third year in a row we’ve showed up at Sibos as exhibitors, co-partnering with one of our most valuable customers, the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance. Mr Laurentiu Andrei called it, in the brought to you by the community session he joined the panel of, “a strange apparition at Sibos” adding that “as far as I know we are the single governmental institution which performs its business using banking tools and being directly connected to SWIFT and financial market infrastructures”.

I can say this was by far the best Sibos ever for us, from all points of view. First of all, we’ve organized the Streamlining the Financial Chain Ecosystem session, were strong messages were delivered, sustaining our latest solution development approach: going as a service and addressing a broader range of industries and customers. The following day, our CEO joined the panel of the brought to you by SWIFT session, Workers’ Remittances: Your global platform for person-to-person payments.

Then, we had an incredible success, even greater than anticipated, with this year’s two novelties: the Payments as a Service and the Workers’ Remittances solutions, dragging brand new customers (and I do not say visitors) to our stand, determined to see a demo of the product. Corporates, commercial banks, service bureaus and partners, they all gathered to see how we implemented these solutions and how we managed to make them work.