The FINANCIAL — Deutsche Postbank AG has come one step closer to its goal of becoming a major player in European payment transaction processing.
At the international payments convention SIBOS in Vienna on September 15 Postbank announced that its subsidiary Betriebs-Center für Banken AG (BCB) has activated its new SAP Payment Engine software for the first time. The new payment engine can process large industrial scale quantities of payment volumes and is multitenant at the same time. The software, which was jointly developed with SAP is already prepared for European payment formats in the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) zone.
Dr. Mario Daberkow, member of the Postbank Board of Management said: "Thanks to the new payments platform from SAP there are no longer any technical limits to our growth as an insourcer of back-office services throughout Europe. The software is scalable and therefore can easily handle rising transaction volumes. At the same time it is so flexible that the new SEPA formats can be quickly implemented as soon as they are launched." Daberkow is anticipating a sharp rise in SEPA format payments from the end of 2009: "By 2010 around half of all European payments will be executed as SEPA payments."
BCB has set itself the goal of becoming one of the major payment service providers in Europe. With processing 7.4 billion transactions per year and a market share of over 20% it is already the largest payment service provider in Germany. It performs services for four of the five major German banks. In Europe it has a market share of 5%. With around 2,700 employees BCB is the second-largest subsidiary in the Postbank Group.
As a result of the standardization of European payments with SEPA it will be possible to practice outsourcing of payment services on an industrial scale on cross-border level for the first time. At the same time the pressure on Europe's banks to implement the legal requirements as cost effectively as possible, constantly increases. "This is the big opportunity for payment factories like BCB," says Daberkow: "Thanks to high transaction volumes it is easier for them to write off the investment costs for state-of-the-art processing technology and profit more from economies of scale. As a consequence payment factories can offer their services with the highest quality at prices that most banks can not realise themselves."