Compass Plus, a leading electronic payment software development company, has announced that it has opened a new office in Singapore to cover the greater Asia Pacific region. Although Compass Plus has had a presence in Asia Pacific since 2003, they chose to coordinate sales efforts via the Hanoi office and are now looking forward to promoting their presence within the AP region and the potential subsequent growth in customer base it will bring.

Nigel Kitson, the newly appointed Regional Sales Director AP said of the opening: "Our message to the market is a very simple one - we will confidently deliver, on time and within budget, function rich systems that will fulfill both current and future payment processing and card management business requirements. The timing is right for a new breed of solutions that are truly customer focused. The opening of our Singapore office confirms our commitment to the Asia Pacific region where we already have an established customer base."

Compass Plus has announced the appointment of Nigel Kitson as Regional Sales Director for Asia Pacific. "As the company continues to develop and grow, we must continue to match it with appointments such as Nigel, who have a boundless supply of knowledge and expertise. We are delighted to welcome him to Compass Plus," said Youri Koliakin, Compass Plus CEO.

Mr Kitson, a former freelance consultant on the retail payments market, has extensive market experience having worked from 1993 to 2007 for ACI Worldwide in a number of roles including Vice President, Marketing & Operations Asia Pacific & Vice President, Sales Asia Pacific.

Of his appointment with Compass Plus he said, "I wanted to join a company that has a fully integrated comprehensive retail payments application portfolio, and a clear and committed business strategy rather than a half full melting pot of disparate systems. This one has it all. Compass Plus is a medium size company with great products, great people and fantastic growth potential. It’s very exciting."

Kapital Bank holds press conference for double celebration: the implementation of their new processing centre and the millionth VISA card being issued since establishment.

On May 21st 2009 a press conference was held at the Kapital Bank headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan, in conjunction with VISA and Compass Plus, to present an award to the customer issued with the millionth VISA card.

The celebrations went on to include the implementation of the bank’s in-house processing centre on May 5th, the first ever in Azerbaijan. The new centre runs on the TranzWare™ platform provided by Compass Plus, a leading international provider of electronic payment software and solutions. Svetlana Georbelidze, a representative of VISA, mentioned in her speech that this event will improve payment services and endorse new projects that will be available for all Azerbaijani citizens. Kapital Bank has the most extensive branch network throughout Azerbaijan and has issued the largest number of cards in the Republic.

Commended for its experience and reliability, Compass Plus was chosen to provide its expertise over 7 other companies in the running for the project. Rauf Rzayev, chairman of Kapital Bank, noted that it was not the price of the solution that was the deciding factor, but the extensive functionality of the banking technologies and Compass Plus’ proven experience in the implementation of innovative and large-scale projects. The company currently serves over 90 financial institutions, processing centres and national switches in 23 countries across the world.

Andrey Chirkov, Regional Director of Compass Plus emphasised the strategic importance of this project for the company in his speech: "We highly value this project as it is a new market for Compass Plus and we feel socially responsible whilst migrating large volumes of cards en masse."

The well organised work from the Compass Plus and Kapital Bank project teams allowed all obstacles to be overcome with ease; with the implementation process taking less than a year in total. Ali Akhundov, the Head of Kapital Bank’s project team stressed the migration process went without losses for both the bank and client, with a gap in service of just 6 hours and approximately 2 million cards being migrated within this window.

In conclusion, Chairman Rauf Rzayev of Kapital Bank noted that having the processing centre is strategically advantageous for the bank as it creates a platform for the long-term development of remote banking services and electronic payments. He went on to look at the bank’s plans for the near future with an emphasis put upon the implementation of a loyalty programme to stimulate the growth of electronic payments and to develop the retail network in Azerbaijan. Thanks to the newly operational platform, Kapital Bank will offer an array of new services, to include mobile and Internet banking. The newly established in-house processing centre will also enable the bank to significantly enhance the security of all card operations as Kapital Bank launched TranzWare Fraud Analyzer, an advanced fraud monitoring and risk management system that will help in the continuous struggle against fraud.

Kapital Bank, being universal in nature, provides a wide range of banking services both for corporate clients and individuals and has the widest network of branches throughout Azerbaijan. It is a bank of social importance – the agent-bank of the State in implementing major governmental and social programs. Kapital Bank is viewed as highly trustworthy in the international arena and is a Principle Member of MasterCard Worldwide and VISA International.
www.kapitalbank.az

Compass Plus and Techcombank, a market-leading commercial bank in Vietnam, have completed a joint project to migrate the Techcombank processing facility to Oracle 11g. Such migration is essential to a bank’s ability to meet the stringent data security requirements of PCI DSS, and successfully undertake the respective certification.

Techcombank was the first bank in Vietnam to embrace TranzWare products back in 2005. Currently the bank makes use of an extensive set of TranzWare products to include TranzWare Online, TranzWare CMS (including its revolving credit facility), TranzWare Card Factory, TranzWare Interchange and TranzWare Fraud Analyser, for all of its card and EFT processing requirements.

In order to minimize the downtime of the bank’s processing facility, the joint technical team decided on a phased migration strategy. The process began with a test server migration which provided valuable hands-on experience, alerted the technical team to various potential pitfalls, and enabled the elaboration of migration procedures and the production of detailed instructions for the personnel involved.

Once detailed preparations had been completed, the actual production server migration sailed through almost unnoticed, causing negligible downtime. This was followed by the server migration of the bank’s disaster recovery system.

Now that the migration has been completed on all the components of the Techcombank card and EFT related IT infrastructure, the bank is ready to undertake PCI DSS certification, which is essential to maintaining its leading position in the Vietnamese card market.

Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint- stock Bank, Techcombank was established in 1993 to take advantage of recently launched economic reforms, with the aim to become an efficient financial intermediary bridging the savers and investors in need of capital for business and economic development in the new open-door era. One of the top commercial banks in the country, Techcombank is renowned for its innovative business approach and heavy reliance on technology.
www.techcombank.com.vn

PrivatBank, the largest card issuer in Ukraine, has announced that it has now issued over 18.5 million cards with a growth of more than 20% - the equivalent of 3.5 million cards - over the past year with its terminal network increasing to include over 7,000 ATMs and 52,000 POS terminals. The role of technology is crucial to such dynamic card business development. The core technological function of the electronic payment infrastructure at PrivatBank is built on TranzWare solutions provided by Compass Plus to help ensure leadership in the market.

The increasing volume and dynamics of PrivatBank’s card business has put forward considerable requirements for the processing centre: not only for its exceptional reliability, but also for system scalability – the need for an increase in processing capacity without a considerable rise in cost (for example, costs of a company-wide hardware upgrade and subsequent project work).

The hardware platform at PrivatBank utilises a number of servers, with a typical server being equipped with 4 Intel® Xeon® dual-core processors and 8 GB RAM. Despite the rather modest specifications of the servers, merging them into the software-hardware cluster provides excellent results – the processing centre staff recorded a competitive peak rate of transactions per second which is in the running with results from far superior servers.

The PrivatBank processing centre successfully handles its increasing workload, taking advantage of the distributed architecture of the TranzWare Online front-office system. The uniqueness of this solution lies in the mechanism of the processing instance, a software component within which TranzWare Online server modules (controlling authorisation, routing, host-to-host interfaces, terminal drivers, etc.) are executed. Instances can run on one server or on various logically connected servers creating a single decentralised environment for the processing system. This allows the following to occur: balancing the loading of the multiprocessor servers, multi-threading tasks on several servers within the cluster and creating backup processes in different instances to achieve fault-tolerance through the duplication of software modules. TranzWare Online also includes a special multiprotocol transaction router, which monitors the availability of processing system instances. In the event of an instance failure, the router automatically switches the network interfaces to the backup server modules (executed within other instances, usually on the other cluster nodes).

The PrivatBank project, therefore, combines a high degree of reliability with ease of scalability. As workload increases, the distributed processing system is expanded to include a mid-level server which runs one or more processing instances, receiving a part of the transaction flow.

PrivatBank is one of the largest Ukrainian banks; it consists of a large service delivery network of over 3,000 branches throughout Ukraine. PrivatBank is the leading issuer and acquirer of payment cards in Ukraine and Principal Member of VISA and MasterCard payment systems. As of May 2009 the bank had issued more than 18.5 million cards and installed more than 7,000 ATMs and 52,000 POS terminals.
www.privatbank.ua

Today, 11th May 2009, AgriBank, Vietnam, is holding a ceremony to mark the go-live of its overall IT overhaul project sponsored by the World Bank. Part of this modernization upgrade is the successful deployment of a new international card switching and card management system on an integrated set of TranzWare applications from Compass Plus. This system has been fully implemented over a number of phases, with each phase delivering new functionalities previously unavailable with the incumbent legacy systems As of today certain areas of the system have already in production for over a year.

The long-term goal of the project was to provide a single fully integrated financial switch, card issuing and acquiring system for all card types and card services that could also provide a range of added value functionalities e.g. ability to clear and settle for multiple financial institutions, a strong fraud detection and management capability and more. The project has also included a strong training and technology transfer component.

The initial project has involved online and file-based interfaces to the core banking system called IPCAS provided by Hyundai IT, integration to the newly established national EFT Switch BankNetVN, Issuer and Acquirer certification for VISA, and migration of AGRIBANK’s massive ATM network. This has all been achieved using a core set of TranzWare products which includes TranzWare Online, TranzWare CMS, TranzWare Card Factory and TranzWare Interchange completed in under 6 months.

Established in March, 1988, Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (AgriBank) has been a leading commercial bank playing a decisive and important role in capital investment in developing the agricultural and rural economy as well as in other fields of Vietnam’s economy. AgriBank is the largest bank in Vietnam in terms of capital, assets, staff, operating network and number of clients. In its consistent effort to excel and to lead the market, AgriBank attaches great importance to the continuous modernization of its technology infrastructure and the efficient application of latest banking technologies.
www.agribank.com.vn

One of the largest and most capitalised banks in Nigeria - Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, together with Compass Plus has successfully commenced a pilot run of TranzWare Online to drive the extensive ATM network of the bank. TranzWare Online is a high-performance, scalable, multi-card processing solution providing efficient and secure switching, authorisation, driving and monitoring of an unlimited number of terminal devices and the handling of multiple delivery channels all on a single platform. This is the first stage in the implementation of comprehensive suite of TranzWare products for the consolidation of the in-house processing platforms that exist at the moment. Further stages will include implementation of TranzWare Card Management System and TranzWare Card Factory for the card management, issuance and personalisation along with other modules of TranzWare Online for POS-acquiring and connectivity with other networks within and outside of Nigeria.

Union Bank of Nigeria was established in 1917 as a Colonial Bank with its first branch in Lagos. In 1925, Barclays Bank acquired the Colonial Bank, which resulted in the change of the bank's name to Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas). By the enactment of the 1972 and 1977 Nigeria Enterprises Promotion Acts, Barclays Bank International disposed its shareholding to Nigerians in 1979. To reflect the new ownership structure and in compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act of 1990, it assumed the name Union Bank of Nigeria Plc. Union Bank of Nigeria is one of the largest and most capitalized banks in Nigeria. It has big and diversified customer base which is served across its network of 405 branches spread out across the country.
www.unionbankng.com