Hamburg Commercial Bank completes SEPA payments cloud migration

Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB) has partnered with fintech Broadridge to migrate its SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) payments business to a cloud-based platform.

Broadridge’s cloud-based platform now hosts HCOB’s SEPA payments business

The transition to Broadridge’s Payments-as-a-Service and business process outsourcing (BPO), and German software vendor PPI AG’s payments technology, has boosted operational efficiency and resilience, with an average straight-through processing rate of more than 99.9% during the first two months of production, HCOB claims.

Broadridge president Samir Pandiri says: “Increasingly, banks are looking to mutualise their core payments operations and capitalise on the advances in modern technology to improve cost/income ratios, grow their customer base and avoid the pitfalls of legacy technology.”

As part of the implementation, HCOB also introduced new EBICS access capability and a new web-based electronic banking channel for all its commercial clients.

EBICS, Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS), is a German transmission protocol that allows corporates to interact directly with their banks.

HCOB CEO Stefan Ermisch says: “With the successful and timely completion of this second and final phase of our payments migration to Broadridge’s SWIFT and SEPA platform, this important milestone of our transformation has now also been accomplished.”

The implementation was completed in under 12 months and follows the transition of HCOB’s TARGET and international SWIFT payments that migrated to the Broadridge service in July 2021.

HCOB’s head of strategy and transformation Daniel Roth says the implementation has enabled “a seamless workflow across all of our payment processing channels, based on a scalable technology platform and outsourcing service”.