BPC selects Oracle Cloud for global expansion in payments processing

BPC (Banking, Payments, Commerce) has played a leading role in critical banking processes for over 25 years, providing payment solutions to virtually every player in the digital payment ecosystem. The company’s platform supplies white-label offerings to banks, neobanks, fintechs, payment service providers, transport operators, and other digital businesses requiring systems for payment switching, fraud management, card lifecycle management, and more.

Yet with the advent of the digital economy and an explosion in neobanks, wallet companies, digital-only banks, Smart City, and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services, BPC decided that future growth could be guaranteed only by adopting a cloud delivery model. Moreover, with a burgeoning set of data to handle, it was faced with having to upgrade its storage capacity.

To meet growing customer demand from multiple regions and save on hardware costs, the company decided to decommission an aging on-premises data center and move its payments suite of products to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

For over 25 years, BPC relied on Oracle Database to deliver scalability, security, and resilience to its customers. Every improvement and iteration of its plug-and-play, highly configurable software took place in an Oracle environment. When the organization looked for a cloud infrastructure solution that could deliver an even higher level of trust and innovation, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was the obvious choice. BPC’s strategy team decided that OCI would help its members focus on core values in the payment business, such as compliance, reliability, added value services, and client relations, without having to worry about the robustness of the infrastructure.

In addition, BPC was attracted by Oracle’s expanding number of global data centers, certified to the financial industry’s highest resilience standards, and its top-tier security that addressed key client concerns about data safety and privacy. “With Oracle, we have been able to strike the right balance between infrastructure and functionality to capture a burgeoning payments business. Our strong cloud platform offers greater availability and stability than either legacy payments software or cloud native startups. That’s our sweet spot,” says BPC’s Michalis Michaelides, director of sales and business development in Europe.

After migrating its SmartVista white-label payments platform to OCI, BPC made it easier for the ecosystem of real-time digital and mobile banking service providers to roll out new payments systems. These systems are rapidly replacing the necessity of carrying cards or cash, such as BNPL and “bank in the pocket” apps.

Moving SmartVista to OCI rewarded the company with the competitive advantage of shortening the time to onboard new customers, thereby empowering the business to deliver innovative payment solutions quickly to clients.

Combining its deep payments expertise with Oracle Database Service’s high availability capabilities—with workloads running 24/7—immediately helped ramp up BPC’s strategy of capturing more market share in Europe, while acquiring new customers in other regions.

In support of that strategy, the company capitalized on Oracle’s global cloud center footprint. BPC is expanding services to digital economy payments providers in the Americas from the Oracle data center in Virginia. It services the booming digital-only banking sector of the Asia-Pacific region from the Oracle data center in Singapore, and runs European operations via the Oracle data center in Germany.

New players are rapidly provisioned with the SmartVista omnichannel payments processing platform—rebranding, styling, and configuring it in a few clicks to enter their own competitive markets with innovative payments enablement products. With OCI, BPC’s customers have minimal upfront investment costs and the ability to focus on data insights instead of infrastructure. OCI’s elasticity means that SmartVista can accommodate top-tier banks running 2,000 transactions per second as well as rapid consumer growth among neobanks, fintechs, wallets, and BNPL players—such as Cake in Vietnam— for whom time to market is essential for success.

OCI also provided BPC with a suite of managed open source data services for greater price-performance flexibility. OCI Search with OpenSearch offers a centralized log store view for engineers to monitor the functionality and performance of all BPC applications. This view streamlines error troubleshooting and helps address compliance requirements. OCI Database with PostgreSQL brings lower costs and quick provisioning—typically under 10 minutes—to run a fully managed PostgreSQL database.

With the Application Programming Interface (API) functionality provided by OCI, BPC offered a user-friendly sandbox for no-code and low-code deployment. It gives third-party developers a portal for imagining, planning, testing, and releasing new services, as well as for testing new features of payment solutions with full API management, including monitoring, request throttling, and security.