BPC ended 2019 on a high and plans on doing the same this year. The paytech firm partnered with Form3 to deliver a complete cloud-based payments solution in June, opened an office in Pakistan to serve the growing financial services market in the area in July, and launched a ‘seed to market’ agritech ecosystem in India in December.
BPC provides three different models for outsource: PaaS, SaaS and tech processing
Here, FinTech Futures asks Peter Theunis, senior vice president (VP), managing director and board member and Jane Loginova what comes next for the paytech and unpacks BPC’s processing business.
FinTech Futures: In 2018, BPC launched its processing business. Could you share some details around the new business? How long did it take to launch?
BPC launched its international processing business in the last quarter of 2018 as we have our own Payments Processing platform, and this was only the commercial launch (under the name CloudIT). The whole process took us six months to put it in the market and to generate first sales results.
FF: What does the future hold for this business? What are your goals over the next three to five years?
Our new processing business is one of our strategic growth areas. In three to five years this will make an important share of the BPC Group revenue.
FF: How does the processing business work? What does it consist in?
Processing complements our standard offering of on-premises software by giving customer a choice of having it as a service. In practice, we provide three different models for outsource: Platform-as-a -service (PaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technical processing. In our PaaS, BPC runs the SmartVista instance of the customer on a dedicated environment, whereas with our SaaS, we run it on a shared environment. Our technical processing is not only running on a shared environment, we also perform all technical processing activities.
FF: What specific needs in the market are you trying to meet with this new business?
BPC CloudIT is focusing on five market segments:
1. Traditional card processing (issuing, acquiring Switching)
2. White labelled PSP services
3. Banking-as-a-Service
4. Fintech
5. Automated Fare Collections
FF: What process did you go through to launch the business? What challenges did you face?
The process was mainly to create awareness that BPC is not only a software company, but we also deliver SaaS service models.
FF: What do you expect from the launch of this new business? Did you get any feedback from your clients (any specific data to disclose)?
We see the PaaS/SaaS/Processing business as one of the growth areas in the coming years. Cost of ownership of such systems becomes more and more expensive, not only due to software but mainly due to compliance and security regulations.
The feedback of our customer base is very positive. The first customers are already live and we are currently onboarding several more. This first months have definitely shown the potential of this business to grow.
For more on BPC’s service models, visit www.bpcbt.com
