News & Press Releases

12 January 2009

OTP Bank Centralises Card Processing with Essentis

WATFORD, ENGLAND — January 12, 2009 — Euronet Essentis Ltd, a leading international provider of Card Issuing and Merchant Acquiring solutions, today announced that OTP Bank Group, the leading Central-European bank, has successfully gone live with the Essentis card management solution.

The Essentis Issuer, Acquirer and Interchange products will provide OTP with a flexible multi-institution and multi-currency solution for both issuing and acquiring on the SUN Solaris platform, allowing OTP to consolidate back-office processing across its domestic and international operations. Full compliance with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB and private label card programs will be provided.

OTP selected Essentis as the product best placed to deliver greater flexibility of product definition, supporting new product initiatives and enabling a faster time to market. Effective end-to-end management of new card and merchant account processing will allow OTP to manage the customer relationship more effectively, while brand and service consistency across all OTP subsidiaries will lead to a better customer experience. Efficient cross border operation will bring substantial cost reductions and enable OTP to promote a single issuing and acquiring relationship with merchants and corporates, generating additional revenues.

A key OTP requirement is the need to support large and rapidly expanding card, merchant and transaction volumes with a high performance software application capable of processing many millions of cards and transactions per day, and delivering outputs within tight deadlines for both batch and online processing. The Essentis partitioning and streaming facility allows blocks of accounts to be processed in parallel, enabling the application to fully exploit multi-processor hardware configurations, leading to dramatic reductions in the batch-processing window.

Ákos Takáts, CIO and Deputy CEO of OTP Bank, said "With Essentis, OTP Bank is able to offer improved customer service and is achieving cost savings through consolidation on to a central platform of its Issuing and Acquiring processing across Central and Eastern Europe. The flexibility of the Essentis solution, particularly the multi-country, multi-institution, multi-currency and multi-level merchant and cardholder hierarchy facilities, will enable OTP Bank to achieve its business objectives and support future expansion."

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About OTP Group

The OTP Bank Group is a multi-national financial institution serving more than 10 million customers across 9 countries. As a leading bank in the Hungarian retail banking sector, OTP administers more than 3 million retail current accounts, and is at the market leader in the card market as well as in electronic banking services. The bank is also a dominant financial provider for corporate and other business clients and municipalities.

In the past few years OTP has completed several successful acquisitions and become a key player in Central and Eastern Europe. It has subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Montenegro and Russia.

About Euronet Essentis Ltd

Euronet Essentis is a leading provider of back-office card issuing and merchant acquiring systems. It has been successfully delivering solutions to the leading players in the payments industry since 1986. The Essentis product has been architected to take advantage of the latest technological developments and designed to incorporate the flexibility and power needed by players in today’s competitive market place. Essentis is the perfect solution for both card issuers and merchant acquirers. It is specifically designed to meet the needs of international institutions. It is fully multi-currency, multi-language, multi-product and multi-institution and is also fully compliant with the EMV standard for chip cards.

For more information please contact:

Euronet Essentis Limited
Marketing and PR
+44 (0)1923 422510
email