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The Co-operative Financial Services (UK) Transforms Payments Environment with Clear2Pay’s Open Payment Framework

Clear2Pay, the international technology provider of next generation payment solutions for financial institutions announces today that it has inked a contract with the Co-operative Financial Services (Manchester, UK) to drive a transformation programme whereby the core banking platform is de-coupled from the various payment schemes to which it connects through a core payments hub. The end goal is to have a single unified payments environment to process all payment types.

The Co-operative Bank, recently voted as the World’s Most Sustainable Bank, is one of the few banks enjoying a favourable track record with its customers in turbulent times. Delivering an outstanding customer experience is of vital importance for the bank and part of that is to deliver payment services through a single platform. The Open Payment Framework provides a clear separation between channels and the core banking systems and allows a variety of channels to deliver payment instructions in any type and format and for the core banking system to receive and manage those in a single ISO 20022 format.

The Co-operative Bank is one of the UK’s largest payment processors; the new system will handle all payment types from UK Faster Payments, BACS, cheques, debit and credit cards and will go live in 2011.

“For the Co-operative Bank being customer centric means, directing every investment and effort towards the benefit of the customer. Clear2Pay’s Open Payment Framework enables us to tackle this from IT up into the business side; having an agile, fast and cost effective platform means delivering a much better and richer service and experience to our customers. With the Open Payment Framework we have the future-proof solution we were looking for to give us advantages from day one. Processing such different payment types and volumes is only possible with a SOA based hub approach. This way we open up the bank towards the customers rather than locking them in”, said Simon Cox, head of Business Systems Strategy at The Co-operative Financial Services.

Mark Hartley, managing director UK & Nordics for Clear2Pay stated: “The Co-operative Bank’s requirement is a unique fit with our vision and mission of delivering a Payments Services Hub processing all payment types including ATM and POS with BACS, UK Faster Payments, and cheques. The Open Payment Framework once again demonstrates its agility in being the hub in a large scale project that transforms the entire core banking systems environment. We are proud to execute this project and thus turn our thought leading payments unification strategy into action in partnership with a very innovative bank”.