Transactis, a joint venture between Société Générale and La Banque Postale, has chosen Sopra Steria for the management of its payment processing system

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Société Générale and La Banque Postale created the Transactis joint venture to optimise their costs, share their know-how and improve their time-to-market. Sopra Steria's Stecard solution was chosen for the platform's front office functions.

Transactis will manage the convergence of the payment processing systems used by La Banque Postale's and Société Générale's front and back offices in order to create a common payment processing platform. Sopra Steria will assist the joint venture with the roll-out of its front office payment processing solution — Stecard — chosen by the two banks.

The challenges

Due to the financial crisis, the banking sector is having to optimise or even reduce the cost of its operations, as well as reposition its customer loyalty strategy — a key element which requires rapid, appropriate solutions to new customer needs. This entails major investments in terms of IT systems.

Transactis can meet these new challenges through the sharing and optimisation of processing costs, as well as the management of volumes processed, combined with the co-investment set up for maintenance and development. This common platform now boasts a flexible, easy-to-configure system that makes it possible to optimise the two financial institutions' time-to-market.

Key points

  • Transactis is a multi-bank, multi-currency, multi-network and multi-language platform.
  • 11,000 Automated Teller Machines (20% of France's ATMs), 170,000 payment terminals, and 20 million cards producing 4 billion transactions per year are managed by Stecard — Sopra Steria's front office solution.

Our solution

As part of the convergence of the front offices of La Banque Postale and Société Générale through Transactis, the Stecard solution manages all front office functions: the Automated Teller Machine (ATM); authorisation and collection of ATM transactions; the Issuer Authorisation Server (IAS); the Acquirer Authorisation Server (AAS); and remote collection of merchant transactions. By using Stecard as its comprehensive solution, Transactis benefits from a simplified, optimised system. The Stecard solution's native multi-bank capability is a real asset which simplifies the environments of each of the banks and enables all front office functions to be commonly managed. Transactis can thus easily adapt to the future developments expected by its customers.

Collaboration between the customer and Sopra Steria

Since 2005, Sopra Steria has been working with La Banque Postale through the Stecard solution which handles IAS and ATM management functions. In 2008, when Transactis was created and the common payment processing platform built, Sopra Steria was involved in establishing the platform's functional framework, defining its architecture, supplying the Stecard application and harmonising the environments.

Sopra Steria has thus worked with Transactis throughout the delivery chain. All front office functionalities are now operational. They include: ATM management, the Issuer Authorisation Server, the Acquirer Authorisation Server, and the remote collection of merchant transactions.

The relationship of trust between the customer's teams and Sopra Steria has been a key factor in the success of such a project.

Results and benefits

Transactis is France's first operational payment processing platform. This "multi" platform, using the Stecard solution, manages large volumes (4 billion transactions per year), with high performance levels in terms of response times as well as 24/7 service availability. In addition, the international environment — which is a native feature of Stecard — has enabled Transactis to interconnect with the international Mastercard and Visa networks since 2012 and thus easily contemplate the processing of transactions worldwide.

The resulting payment platform has also enabled Transactis to offer these services to other banks, in particular to subsidiaries of Société Générale. In 2011, Crédit du Nord thus decided to join the platform over the next two years. Over the longer term, the Czech subsidiary KB is also expected to join the platform.

Sopra Steria and Transactis have worked as true partners on this project to make it a joint success. They are continuing to develop this unique project together.

Sopra Steria's mobilisation and its ability to meet our needs have been key factors in the success of our payment processing platform project, despite the complexity of the multi-bank dimension. With the software suite's native multi-country feature, we can now look to integrate foreign subsidiaries into the platform.

ALAIN NICAUD

Chairman of Transactis