BPC selects OCI for global expansion in payments processing
European banking, payments, and commerce leader switches to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to increase the time to market for digital payment enablers.
“The past few years have been exceptional in terms of innovation in the world of payments. By hosting our solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we are spearheading the disruption of the legacy payment business by giving customers a real-time transactions platform that makes a difference in the way we bank, pay, and organize our cities.”
Business challenges
BPC (Banking, Payments, Commerce) has played a leading role at the heart of critical banking processes for over 25 years, providing payment solutions to virtually every player in the digital payment ecosystem.
BPC’s platform supplies white-label offerings to banks, neobanks, fintechs, payment service providers, transport operators, and all other digital businesses requiring systems for payment switching, fraud management, card lifecycle management, and more.
Yet with the advent of the digital economy and an explosion in neobanks, wallet companies, digital-only banks, smart city and buy-now-pay-later services, BPC decided that future growth could be guaranteed only by adopting a cloud delivery model. Moreover, with a burgeoning set of data to handle, it was faced with having to upgrade its storage capacity.
To meet growing customer demand from multiple regions and save on hardware costs, the company decided to decommission an aging on-premises data center and move its payments suite of products to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Payment processing is a complex business that we want to own by using our expertise to inject fresh ideas, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the means to accomplish that.
Why BPC Group chose Oracle
BPC relied on Oracle Database to deliver the scalability, security, and resilience its customers deserve. Every improvement and iteration of its plug-and-play, highly configurable software took place in an Oracle environment. When the organization looked for a cloud infrastructure solution that could deliver an even higher level of trust and innovation, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was the obvious choice.
BPC’s strategy team felt that OCI would allow its members to focus on core values in the payments business, such as compliance, reliability, added-value services, and client relations, without worrying about the robustness of the infrastructure.
In addition, BPC was attracted by Oracle’s expanding number of global data centers, certified to the financial industry’s highest resilience standards, and the top-tier security that addressed key client concerns about data safety and privacy.
“With Oracle, we have been able to strike the right balance between infrastructure and functionality to capture a burgeoning payments business. Our strong cloud platform offers greater availability and stability than either legacy payments software or cloud native startups. That’s our sweet spot,” says Michalis Michaelides, BPC’s director of sales and business development in Europe.
Results
By migrating its SmartVista payments platform to OCI, BPC made it easier for the ecosystem of real-time digital and mobile banking service providers to roll out new payments systems that are rapidly eliminating the need to carry cards or cash. After moving SmartVista to OCI, the company gained a competitive advantage in shortening the time to onboard new customers, thereby empowering the business to deliver innovative payment solutions quickly to clients.
Combining its deep payments expertise with OCI’s high availability capabilities—with workloads running 24/7—helped ramp up BPC’s strategy of capturing more market share in Europe, while acquiring new customers in other regions.
In support of that strategy, the company capitalized on Oracle’s global cloud center footprint. BPC is expanding services to digital economy payments providers in the Americas from the Oracle data center in Virginia. It services the booming digital-only banking sector of the Asia-Pacific region from the Oracle data center in Singapore, and runs European operations via the Oracle data center in Germany.
New players are rapidly provisioned with the SmartVista omnichannel payments processing platform—rebranding, styling, and configuring it in just a few clicks to enter their own competitive markets with innovative payments enablement products. With OCI, BPC’s customers have minimal upfront investment costs and the ability to focus on data insights instead of infrastructure.
The elasticity of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure means that SmartVista can accommodate top-tier banks running 2,000 transactions per second as well as rapid consumer growth among neobanks, fintechs, wallets, and BNPL players—such as Cake in Vietnam—for whom time to market is the essential ingredient for success.
With the Application Programming Interface (API) functionality provided by OCI, BPC offers a user-friendly sandbox for no-code and low-code deployment. It gives third-party developers a portal for imagining, planning, testing, and releasing new services, as well as for testing new features of payment solutions with full API management—including monitoring, request throttling, and security.
About the customer
With a footprint spanning 100 countries, BPC offers a processing service for white-label payments that connects the entire spectrum of the payments industry—from banks, acquirers, and issuers to payment service providers, ewallets, neobanks, transport operators, superapps, and merchants.