PayTech Awards 2022 Winner: BHMI – Editor’s Choice

By working together, BHMI and Payshop achieved a successful and timely implementation to deliver Concourse – a unified payments back office solution for Payshop.

Payshop runs on BHMI’s Concourse – a unified payments back office solution. Image source: CTT

Payshop, a subsidiary of Banco CTT and part of the CTT Group, serves Portugal through an extensive portfolio of payment services and was amid a strategic business transformation project.

The company has a retail footprint of more than 7,000 locations distributed between a retail agents’ network and post office branches. Wanting to expand its omnichannel capabilities to adapt to the needs of e-commerce and digital payment gateways, Payshop also needed to keep up with the ever-growing demand for digital payment solutions beyond cash and traditional card schemes.

With more than 20 years of industry experience, Payshop found its biggest challenge was a highly fragmented back office.

The back office performs critical functions like transaction reconciliation and settlement. It also performs the assessment of transaction-based fees and the management of disputes.

Additionally, the back office should provide access to real-time transaction data and financial positions, allow users to perform transaction research, provide accurate and timely reports, and many more related functions.

Specific issues included:

Batch settlement processing. Financial services companies have done a good job of offering applications that allow users to quickly create and post payments (which can be done in seconds). The problem, however, is that a payment is not truly completed until it is settled, and most back office systems are batch-oriented. When payments hit a batch-oriented back office, they are not processed to completion. Instead, they are gathered into large batch files that are collected throughout the day and submitted for settlement once or twice over this period. Until this point, the payment is not complete.

The inability to change or adjust back office systems without extensive code revisions. Most of these legacy systems cannot support newer digital and account-to-account payments without massive and expensive software changes.

Supporting new payment message formats such as ISO 20022. For decades, the industry has used ISO 8583 as the international message standard for payment systems that exchange card-based transactions. However, ISO 20022 is the emerging global standard used by faster payment networks and rails around the world, offering much richer, more robust data capabilities.

The ability to provide a real-time enterprise view of all transactions and payment activity. This can be a struggle because a company’s back office infrastructure consists of disparate, siloed systems that do not interconnect. This results in lack of visibility into the true status of payments throughout a processing day.

Thus, Payshop needed a single unified back office solution for payment services in several vertical application stacks. This would help to get to a true omnichannel approach to retail, internet, mobile and partner acquisition channels. A further aim was to develop and implement additional capabilities to leverage 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 meet these objectives, Payshop selected BHMI and its powerful, adaptive Concourse Financial Software Suite. Today, Concourse is the unified payments back office solution for Payshop.

Regardless of the underlying attributes such as the payment channel or payment method, all transactions are fed into Concourse once they have been authorised. Once those transactions are loaded, fees and commissions are assessed, and settlement is calculated.

The Payshop team can then access the payment transaction data and view current settlement positions in real time. If one of its customers reports an issue with a transaction later, the team can easily research the problem within Concourse, select the transaction in question, and create a dispute to be worked and resolved.

Transaction research, fee and commission assessment, settlement, and dispute processing are all unified in Concourse.

Due to the seamless, smooth success of the project, CEO of Payshop, Tiago Mota, shared: “Choosing Concourse as our core platform and BHMI as a partner in our technology transformation journey keeps providing tremendous value. Thank you to all the project’s team members, who have been an example of client dedication, enormous experience, and professionalism throughout this journey.”

This project was successful due to its 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 aligns with customer needs and expectations.