Working together, BHMI and Payshop achieved a successful and timely implementation to deliver Concourse – a unified payment back-office solution for Payshop.
Payshop runs on BHMI’s Concourse – a unified payment back-office solution. Image source: CTT
Payshop, a subsidiary of Banco CTT and part of the CTT Group, serves Portugal with an extensive portfolio of payment services and was in the midst of a strategic business transformation project.
The company has a retail footprint of over 7,000 locations across a network of retail agents and postal agencies. Wanting to expand its omnichannel capabilities to accommodate the needs of e-commerce and digital payment gateways, Payshop also needed to meet the ever-growing demand for digital payment solutions beyond traditional cash and card systems.
With over 20 years of industry experience, Payshop found its biggest challenge was a highly fragmented back office.
The back office performs essential functions such as reconciliation and settlement of transactions. It also ensures the assessment of transaction costs and the management of disputes.
Additionally, the back office should provide access to real-time transaction data and financial positions, allow users to search transactions, provide accurate and timely reports, and many other related functions.
Specific issues included:
Batch payment processing. Financial services companies have done a good job of offering apps that allow users to quickly create and post payments (which can be done in seconds). The problem, however, is that a payment isn’t really made until it’s cleared, and most back office systems are batch oriented. When payments arrive in a batch-oriented back-office, they are not processed to completion. Instead, they are bundled into large batch files that are collected throughout the day and submitted for settlement once or twice during that period. Up to this point the payment is not complete.
The inability to change or adjust back-office systems without extensive code reviews. Most of these legacy systems cannot support new digital and account-to-account payments without massive and costly software changes.
Support for new payment message formats such as ISO 20022. For decades, the industry has used ISO 8583 as the international messaging standard for payment systems that exchange card transactions. However, ISO 20022 is the emerging global standard used by faster payment networks and rails around the world, providing much richer and more robust data capabilities.
The ability to provide a real-time business view of all payment transactions and activity. This can be difficult because a company’s back-office infrastructure consists of disparate, siled systems that are not interconnected. This results in a lack of visibility into the actual status of payments throughout a processing day.
Thus, Payshop needed a single, unified back-office solution for payment services across multiple vertical application stacks. This would help achieve a true omnichannel approach across retail, web, mobile, and partner acquisition channels. Another goal was to develop and implement additional capabilities to take advantage of expansion into new markets.
Payshop had the following business objectives:
- Deploy a single unified back-office solution for payment services
- Implement a true omnichannel approach across all acquisition channels
- Support new requirements without having to make software changes
To achieve these goals, Payshop selected BHMI and its powerful adaptive software suite Concourse Financial. Today, Concourse is the unified payment back-office solution for Payshop.
Regardless of the underlying attributes such as payment channel or payment method, all transactions enter Concourse once they have been authorized. Once these transactions are loaded, the fees and commissions are assessed and the settlement is calculated.
The Payshop team can then access payment transaction data and view current settlement positions in real time. If one of their customers later reports an issue with a transaction, the team can easily find the issue in Concourse, select the transaction in question, and create a dispute to process and resolve.
Searching for transactions, assessing fees and commissions, settling and handling disputes are all unified in Concourse.
Due to the smooth and seamless success of the project, Payshop CEO Tiago Mota said, “Choosing Concourse as our primary platform and BHMI as our partner in our technology transformation journey continues to deliver tremendous value. Thank you to all of the project team members, who have been an example of customer dedication, enormous experience and professionalism throughout this journey.
This project was successful due to the focus on people, processes and the product itself. BHMI and Payshop had the right people in the right roles, following a proven implementation process designed to deliver a solution that matches customer needs and expectations.
