Polar Moment assists Euronet in delivering SEPA compliant cross-border processing solution

Polar Moment Assists Euronet in Delivering SEPA-compliant Crossborder Processing Solution

Euronet is an industry leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions – serving clients in over 130 countries worldwide and processing over one billion payment transactions annually.

The company has an enviable and extensive client base and offers EFT software, network gateways and electronic, prepaid top-up services to financial institutions, mobile operators and retailers across the globe.

In 2007, Euronet signed a long-term agreement with a leading oil and gas group, OMV, to deliver its first SEPA-compliant, cross-border transaction processing solution. OMV wished to migrate decentralised acquiring operations across 12 countries into one single, central, SEPA-compliant processing platform. Upon full rollout, the Euronet platform will cover approximately 5,000 POS terminals as well as POS management and fuel card
authorisation services.

Cross-border, multi-currency payment solution

Euronet implemented a cross-border, multi-currency card payments and fuel card solution to enable retailers to send all of their transactions for processing to a single payment processor. The system provided support for EMV Chip and Pin cards and was implemented using a sophisticated Postilion system. In 2007, OMV became the first customer to adopt the new Euronet system. The system enables OMV to implement the same point of sale systems and technical infrastructure in every country, negating the need for multiple acquiring relationships, and enabling the retailer to operate a single head office accounts department.

Faced with complex and feature-rich customer requirements, aggressive project timescales and a requirement to provide experienced support functions to meet the expectations of OMV, Euronet chose Polar Moment – the leading provider of business and technical consultancy to the payments industry.

Postilion delivery

The implemented solution was based on a sophisticated Postilion platform and, as such, relied heavily on access to experienced payment technicians to deliver the following:

Preparation of test plans, scenarios and cases for point of sale and centralised processing functions.
Technical support to set-up a series of test and production environments to prove the system
deliverables.
A project team to liaise with the vendor on all technical matters.

Successful delivery of the project was reliant on in-depth knowledge of the Postilion system and considerable technical expertise. Euronet selected Polar Moment in the delivery of the OMV project.

The Polar Moment team took the lead in coordinating all Postilion-related activities, adding significant value to the project. Using its strong network across the payments industry, Polar Moment was able to provide Euronet with a team of nine highly experienced payment consultants within a matter of weeks. The Polar Moment consultants liaised with senior teams within Euronet and OMV to fully understand the business and technical drivers for the project. The team’s strong customer focus enabled Polar Moment to develop an
understanding of the cross-cultural requirements necessary to deliver the project successfully.

Polar Moment facilitated the preparation of testing activities for point of sale and centralised processing functions, proving key deliverables of the Postilion platform. Providing a highly qualified project team that could liaise directly with the vendor on technical matters, Polar Moment ensured that system specifications were implemented according to the design. All software upgrades and patches from the payment system vendor were checked for functional correctness before being passed to the test team. The project team also
supported the integration of Postilion elements with other Euronet applications. To ensure that the project continued to deliver added value to OMV once implemented, the Polar Moment team also:

Provided Postilion configuration support for updates such as adding new card types or rolling-out the service to additional countries.
Installed and configured software updates from the vendor onto test servers and provided initial testing before passing to the test team.
Completed go-live activities and liaised with the productions operations team for handover to live processing.

Production operations

Euronet relied on a team with strong knowledge and expertise working with Postilion systems. Polar Moment was selected to support the complex and feature-rich Postilion platform and to provide an extensive Postilion support function.

To support Euronet in the implementation of the OMV system, Polar Moment provided a team of experienced Postilion production support engineers. As well as providing a head of production operations to manage the entire platform, Polar Moment provided experienced Postilion technicians to focus on the elements of the live system. The Production operations team was in place, trained and ready for live operations in time for the scheduled implementation of the project.

Polar Moment also provided an on-call team that was available to respond immediately to any live issues, ensuring the system remained available to OMV 24hours per day. The team also provided a technical interface between Euronet and Postilion – diagnosing any application-specific problems and communicating them to Postilion, so that appropriate fixes could be provided quickly and efficiently.

Active/Active

In addition to standard operations, Polar Moment provided support in the implementation of a highly complex Postilion Active/ Active configuration, in support of providing extremely high system availability by mirroring transactions between two live data centres on a real-time transaction by transaction basis. By supporting the Postilion Active/Active implementation, Polar Moment helped to ensure that downtime was reduced, thus ensuring very high availability to the end customer.

The Active/ Active configuration provided an effective disaster recovery system, eliminating a major technical risk.

Cross-training of in-house staff

To ensure the continued success of the project, Polar Moment provided training to Euronet’s in-house team so that they could take ownership of their own platform.

Outcome

Polar Moment simplified the roll-out of Euronet’s SEPA-compliant processing platform by providing exceptionally high levels of Postilion expertise and technical knowledge. Building an excellent rapport with OMV and delivering a strong customer focus, Polar Moment helped Euronet to achieve an outstandingly high level of customer satisfaction.

Polar Moment’s consultants were part of the Euronet core team in ensuring that this pioneering Postilion implementation was successful and was one of the first consultancies to provide Euronet with resources for the OMV project. The team has continued to exceed expectations and is now the only provider to still have consultants working on the project today.