Hightech Payment Systems
Making Cutting-Edge Payment Technologies Accessible
Nabil Ibenbrahim, Managing DirectorIn an interview with CIOReview APAC, Nabil Ibenbrahim, Managing Director of HPS, shares his insights on how the company leverages its expertise to provide exceptional payment solutions to clients across different industries.
Thank you for your time Nabil. Our first question - what are some of the leading factors that position HPS as the go-to partner for businesses seeking cutting-edge payment card technologies?
It’s a combination of factors that make our clients extremely happy about working with us. What clients appreciate the most is our impressive 25 years of experience in the payment industry, our comprehensive understanding of the payment landscape, and the fact that we are a tech company purpose built to deliver the different microservices and technologies the market needs. Our customers appreciate the mix of our experience, industry knowledge, and tech expertise to keep them ahead in today’s constantly evolving payments landscape.
With PowerCARD, users can directly initiate merchant transactions on their main platform and transform their customer-loyalty scenario into a comprehensive payment experience
Today, we are proud to share that PowerCARD is used by more than 450 institutions in over 90 countries, and that we have worked with more than 40 national government schemes around the world.
In terms of migration, 85-90% of our customer cases involve replacing legacy systems. We have considerable experience in migrating not one but multiple legacy platforms. Since we have done this many times, clients trust us with their systems migration, a highly critical aspect for any organisation.
Internally, our team and company size of 1,000+ consultants is powered by a very agile infrastructure.
We also invest a significant amount of our revenue back into R&D so that we are ready to address our client’s future demands.
Please give me an understanding of who your typical clients are and what overarching challenges you solve for them.
At HPS, we serve clients from a variety of sectors. Many come from the financial services industry, including banks and loan companies, and for whom we address their payment requirements and consolidate multiple platforms into our single technology platform. Recently we successfully moved one customer’s payment infrastructure, originally fragmented across 18 products, onto one consolidated platform.
We make it possible for clients to launch new products at speed and scale, and to also become part of a collaborative fintech ecosystem, leveraging our innovative digital capabilities. Our APIs and platform features mean that we can easily integrate with other fintech companies or digital banks whose major requirements are payment-related. For example, if they wish to issue wallet and address merchant, QR code, NFT, and other instant payment avenues.
Our firm also delivers national and regional switches to help countries to overcome their data sovereignty issues and enable local payment schemes and nationwide interoperability. Our retail clients use our solution to address payment requirements like issuing a proprietary e-gift card or a credit card, allowing them to handle their financial needs independently.
Additionally, we provide comprehensive support to fintech merchant aggregators, helping them effectively manage their merchant networks while seamlessly operating alongside acquirers and national payment infrastructures. Our solutions also serve as a reliable payment gateway for telecom operators.
When you say you help fintechs, what role does HPS play?
Today, firms in the fintech space use our platform to address all their payment requirements. For example, we can help them to issue a digital card, manage merchant requirements for QR code payments, customer loyalty programs, and comprehensive payment experiences.
We can also provide solutions for fintech businesses consuming our technology through a SaaS model. Alternatively, our banking partners can provide our APIs to these fintechs for their consumption. Essentially, fintechs use our solutions and/or our APIs to integrate with their customers’ technology.
Please delve into your PowerCARD software and some of its key capabilities.
PowerCARD is our comprehensive payment solution. We address all the payment requirements of different sectors through a set of modules. A key area is issuing, where we manage all payment issuing requirements for our customers. Whether digital, credit, prepaid, installment, virtual, or physical cards, we handle the entire digital wallet management for Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay, together with the whole QR code lifecycle.
In addition, we have the acquiring capabilities to fully support merchant acquiring needs of banks looking to establish an acquiring network, payment aggregators between a bank and acquirer, or retailers who would like to manage acquiring networks on a private loop.
Please give me an understanding of who your typical clients are and what overarching challenges you solve for them.
At HPS, we serve clients from a variety of sectors. Many come from the financial services industry, including banks and loan companies, and for whom we address their payment requirements and consolidate multiple platforms into our single technology platform. Recently we successfully moved one customer’s payment infrastructure, originally fragmented across 18 products, onto one consolidated platform.
We make it possible for clients to launch new products at speed and scale, and to also become part of a collaborative fintech ecosystem, leveraging our innovative digital capabilities. Our APIs and platform features mean that we can easily integrate with other fintech companies or digital banks whose major requirements are payment-related. For example, if they wish to issue wallet and address merchant, QR code, NFT, and other instant payment avenues.
Our firm also delivers national and regional switches to help countries to overcome their data sovereignty issues and enable local payment schemes and nationwide interoperability. Our retail clients use our solution to address payment requirements like issuing a proprietary e-gift card or a credit card, allowing them to handle their financial needs independently.
Additionally, we provide comprehensive support to fintech merchant aggregators, helping them effectively manage their merchant networks while seamlessly operating alongside acquirers and national payment infrastructures. Our solutions also serve as a reliable payment gateway for telecom operators.
When you say you help fintechs, what role does HPS play?
Today, firms in the fintech space use our platform to address all their payment requirements. For example, we can help them to issue a digital card, manage merchant requirements for QR code payments, customer loyalty programs, and comprehensive payment experiences.
We can also provide solutions for fintech businesses consuming our technology through a SaaS model. Alternatively, our banking partners can provide our APIs to these fintechs for their consumption. Essentially, fintechs use our solutions and/or our APIs to integrate with their customers’ technology.
Please delve into your PowerCARD software and some of its key capabilities.
PowerCARD is our comprehensive payment solution. We address all the payment requirements of different sectors through a set of modules. A key area is issuing, where we manage all payment issuing requirements for our customers. Whether digital, credit, prepaid, installment, virtual, or physical cards, we handle the entire digital wallet management for Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay, together with the whole QR code lifecycle.
In addition, we have the acquiring capabilities to fully support merchant acquiring needs of banks looking to establish an acquiring network, payment aggregators between a bank and acquirer, or retailers who would like to manage acquiring networks on a private loop.
Finally, our switching feature adapts to all national switches and governments looking to set up their scheme locally. This capability helps our clients use local payment schemes to enable country-level interoperability and build international payment connections with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Japan Credit Bureau (JCB), and many others to safeguard and optimize global transactions.
So far, there are five international payment organizations in the world, among which one is using our solutions to issue cards and manage their merchant acquisition in more than 19 countries worldwide.
Coming back to our solutions, as well as issuing, acquiring, and switching, we also have satellite modules, fraud and dispute management, a set of APIs for each interface with different systems, along with automated teller machines (ATM) or point-of-sale (POS)-driven solutions.
Could you please share a recent HPS success story?
One of our best success stories is of an international payment organization whose core business is based on our PowerCARD solution. We manage about 18 countries for them and around 19 currencies.
This is a success story because we unified 16 systems with one technology platform. With PowerCARD, they built an ecosystem of fintechs that can consume APIs to issue a wallet and tokenize cards using Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay.
We also have many multinational banking customers among the top 50 banks worldwide. They implemented this solution to manage their issuing platforms in countries worldwide, while others could launch virtual and multi-currency wallets across multiple nations.
Another sector is the processors or SaaS providers using this platform to offer cloud-powered multi-banking options to their end users. HPS sells this solution either on-premise or on a SaaS.
The beauty of HPS is that we own this technology and we can provide it as a SaaS. We also have some leading SaaS providers looking for a technology to address their target markets, who are using our technology to provide holistic payment services to their end users. It’s not necessarily a white-label solution, but banks can directly use our solution or provide them to SaaS providers looking to use our technology.
Are there any other exciting insights that you would like to share?
From a strategic point of view, HPS is a company that has grown significantly. To build on this growth, we have partnered with several other industry leading companies to continue providing comprehensive services to our customers. We recently acquired and established partnerships with Thales Group, the national switch of Morocco, which acquired renowned African payment and banking processor ICPS, along with fraud manager and cash flow testing partner IPRC, and launched a Mauritius-based processing center.
We want to develop more partnerships to continue providing comprehensive solutions to our clients.
So far, there are five international payment organizations in the world, among which one is using our solutions to issue cards and manage their merchant acquisition in more than 19 countries worldwide.
Coming back to our solutions, as well as issuing, acquiring, and switching, we also have satellite modules, fraud and dispute management, a set of APIs for each interface with different systems, along with automated teller machines (ATM) or point-of-sale (POS)-driven solutions.
Could you please share a recent HPS success story?
One of our best success stories is of an international payment organization whose core business is based on our PowerCARD solution. We manage about 18 countries for them and around 19 currencies.
This is a success story because we unified 16 systems with one technology platform. With PowerCARD, they built an ecosystem of fintechs that can consume APIs to issue a wallet and tokenize cards using Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay.
We also have many multinational banking customers among the top 50 banks worldwide. They implemented this solution to manage their issuing platforms in countries worldwide, while others could launch virtual and multi-currency wallets across multiple nations.
Another sector is the processors or SaaS providers using this platform to offer cloud-powered multi-banking options to their end users. HPS sells this solution either on-premise or on a SaaS.
The beauty of HPS is that we own this technology and we can provide it as a SaaS. We also have some leading SaaS providers looking for a technology to address their target markets, who are using our technology to provide holistic payment services to their end users. It’s not necessarily a white-label solution, but banks can directly use our solution or provide them to SaaS providers looking to use our technology.
Are there any other exciting insights that you would like to share?
From a strategic point of view, HPS is a company that has grown significantly. To build on this growth, we have partnered with several other industry leading companies to continue providing comprehensive services to our customers. We recently acquired and established partnerships with Thales Group, the national switch of Morocco, which acquired renowned African payment and banking processor ICPS, along with fraud manager and cash flow testing partner IPRC, and launched a Mauritius-based processing center.
We want to develop more partnerships to continue providing comprehensive solutions to our clients.
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Company
Hightech Payment Systems
Management
Nabil Ibenbrahim, Managing Director
Description
HPS is a multinational company, a leading provider of payment solutions and services. HPS’ PowerCARD is a comprehensive solutions suite that covers the entire payment value chain by enabling innovative payments and transactions initiated from any channel by any means of payment.
