Service models: The future of fintech

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 a new international processing business in the last quarter of 2018 leveraging on our proprietary Payments Processing platform. While this quarter marks the commercial launch, it took us six months to set up the organisation, go to market and generate first results in terms of client adoption.

FF: What does the future hold for this business? What are your goals over the next three to five years?
Payments processing is one of BPC’s key strategic business for growth. We see a surge in partnerships between payments handlers and processors for many reasons. The cost of ownership of such systems becomes more and more
expensive, not only due to software but mainly due to compliance and security regulations. As BPC masters payments processing and reaps the benefits of the shared platform economy, we expect this business to become an important share of
the BPC Group’s revenue within three to five years.

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?
When it comes to processing, BPC 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?
BPC is known as an established software company. Our focus at launch was to increase the market awareness around our SaaS services capabilities, moving beyond the software label.

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 expect the PaaS/SaaS/processing business to flourish in the coming years. To date, the response has been impressive as we proudly onboarded our first customers live on our platform within only few months. We are currently welcoming several more. These first months have confirmed the growth potential of this business for BPC.

For more on BPC’s service models, visit www.bpcbt.com