With the right solutions, financial institutions can realize the economic benefits of SEPA

In June this year, the SEPA Council met for the first time. Bringing together representatives from both the demand and supply sides of the market to include consumers, corporate and public administrations, as well as financial institutions, the council was created to guide and strengthen the development of the European financial initiative, which aims to establish an integrated market for Euro payments. The SEPA Council has been welcomed by many in the hope that it will help to create a retail payment framework that fully meets the expectations of all affected parties. In line with this, technology solution providers have also taken it upon themselves to develop the IT infrastructures and systems required to help financial institutions comply with the new requirements.

Stepping up to the challenge, Business Information Systems (BIS) is one such partner that understood the importance of identifying the specific requirements of the main stakeholders’ needs in order to help them comply with the new payments framework. The result of this approach was qPayIntegrator, a payments hub that ensures operational risk containment through clearing and settlement-related business flow automation and liquidity management, while providing a rich set of payment exceptions detections, early alerts for fraud attempts and competitive trends features. The solution is sizeable to fit commercial banks’ back-offices, State Treasuries, corporate treasuries and service bureaus payment business. qPayIntegrator is the ideal platform to up-scale the financial transactions processing across the supply chain, providing end-to-end business interoperability.

While qPayIntegrator was initially developed and deployed based on other integrative technology, BIS architects have discovered the value Microsoft BizTalk Server might bring in terms of reducing development cycles and recurring maintenance cost, as well as several new features (over 25 multi-platform adapters, EDI connectivity, business activity monitoring, RFID capabilities and IBM host/mainframe connectivity). Therefore BIS has decided to port its payment engine on Microsoft BizTalk technology, which proved to be a straightforward process (with support from Microsoft), including technical platform preparation, solution redesign, development, software maintenance & support.

With a commitment to providing trustworthy solutions, qPayIntegrator is certified for the following: SWIFTReady Application SEPA 2008 (first solution endorsed by SWIFT for the SEPA track); SWIFTReady Application SEPA 2009; SWIFTReady Application Workers’ Remittances 2010 (under certification); and Microsoft ‘Compatible with Windows 7’ certification 2010.

BIS has already carried out a number of implementations of qPayIntegrator, including a proof-of-concept deployment at a Romanian bank and a rollout at the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance, where the system is being piloted as a governmental funds management system. Here, the solution’s built-in scalability is being taken advantage of to control financial execution through a secure funds channel, to achieve transparency in the financial management of the public funds, operational risk containment, advanced liquidity reporting and forecasting, as well as business alignment to EU financial regulations. A western European micro-financing company is also working with BIS to deploy the solution to ensure the business-to-business integration of its back-office systems with external mobile payment providers.

Commenting on qPayIntegrator success last year, Microsoft’s vice president of worldwide industry and global accounts Susan Hauser said: “Banks are focused on achieving greater interoperability and higher quality distribution channels that provide enhanced treasury services to customers in order to help them realize the economic benefits of SEPA. We are pleased to be working with leading financial services partners such as BIS to help our customers achieve these goals.”