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Ahead in the CloudTo survive 35 years in the fast-moving world of financial technology, you’ve got to be doing a lot right. And TAS Group undoubtedly has been.

Built in Rome and still headquartered there, the software solutions company has a track record in simplifying the way in which private and public sectors, commercial and national banks interact with their customers, stakeholders and technology systems. It manages millions of European central banks’ daily financial messages and 75 million cards in total on its worldwide platforms; 35 million of them belong to the Italian Post Office’s BancoPosta, one of the biggest issuers of prepaid cards in Europe.

With offices in the US, Brazil and across mainland Europe, it’s seen a lot of changes in the past three decades in electronic money, payment systems, capital markets and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

But in senior vice president of product development Peter Caiazzi’s opinion there’s been nothing to equal opportunities created by the Cloud.

“We think this is a gamechanger,”

Italy’s TAS Group is forging ahead with plans to make its services available anytime, anyplace, anywhere, as Peter Caiazzi, Senior VP of product development, explains

says Caiazzi. “The first generation card systems were mainframe-based. From there, it went to open systems-based, and we think the next trend – although it’s going to take a number of years – is Cloud-based. We intend to be a leader there. Together with our functional and product management team, we’ve already decomposed all of the functionality that’s comprised in our product and we’re going to offer it through APIs in the Cloud.’

He says the company is working through a couple of ‘important partners that are household names in banking’, but it’s too early to reveal who they are.

“By the end of the year, customers who perhaps don’t know us in, for example, France, Germany or the US, could find us online if they’re looking for a card management system or a card processing system. They’ll be able to buy our services in the same way people buy virtual machines through the Cloud. They’ll be able to buy

| www.fintech.finance Summer 2017

access to the database, even process salesforce automation, card management, card processing, tokenisation through APIs.”

Understanding how to exploit Cloud-operated systems influences a significant chunk of future innovation for TAS Group. Caiazzi believes it will underpin the way in which consumers receive (and demand) services. For instance, they may not want to have all their banking services in one place; they might want to self-serve in other ways other than through their mobile phone. As a consequence, it wants to give TAS Group customers the option not to have all of their infrastructure on premise, or all of their infrastructure in the Cloud.

“They have to do what makes sense for them, given their circumstances,” says Caiazzi. “For example, the post-sales part of a card management system, like changing PINs, changing limits on a card, participating in GeoControl for security, enabling internet payments, are things consumers now expect to do through their

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Liberated: TAS Group serviceswill be API-enabled through the Cloud

customer (KYC), real-time fraud prevention. Batch to message-based systems is probably a once-in-a-generation kind of change.”

Banks can’t complain – they’ve largely become a victim of their own success, having produced some excellent home banking apps, which have whetted the consumers’ appetite for even more innovation and faster, real-time banking, says Caiazzi.

“It might lead banks to rethink how they can do things at lower cost; it might lead them to offer new value-added services, such as coupons or targeted loyalty programmes,” he says.

Like most in the industry, he recognises that the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is going to have a ‘massive’ impact on consumers and the industry.

“There will be a huge amount of losers and a few winners – and one of those winners is clearly going to be the consumer

because they are going to be able to do things they hadn’t ever imagined and they’re going to really like it.”

He forecasts consolidation among existing service providers in the instant payments market, pointing to the rapid success of the Italian person-to-person (P2P) mobile payments app Jiffy, which topped 4.2 million users for the first time this spring. “It could be interesting if there emerged a European Champion in the P2P space,” he says.

PSD2 also opens up a new world of possibilities.

“There could, for example, be some kind of service for people who want higher paying interest, zero-risk saving accounts. Given PSD2 – and other European regulations – savers from northern Europe might, in the future, prefer to put their money in bank- and government-guaranteed Southern European foreign bank accounts, up to the guarantee limit, that offer better interest rates with the simplicity of opening foreign savings accounts in their local languages.”

“I think we’re going to find a lot of disruption in e-commerce, driven by instant payment and PSD2. We think the change in payments is going to be pretty big and we are well-positioned to take advantage of that.”

Summer 2017 www.fintech.finance |

mobile phones. That might be something that banks could quickly and securely roll out through APIs, in the Cloud, through their card management service provider – and it would be cost-efficient.

“On the other hand, banks may decide it doesn’t make sense to do card processing in the Cloud and it’s a lot easier for them to do it on the premises. So we can see that there could be a mix and match approach. We believe that this opportunity extends beyond the card issuing space.

“It is important that the systems are designed to be fully distributed and they’re API-based, so they can be quickly deployed to take advantage of client infrastructure.”

Nurturing growth in innovation is matched by TAS Group’s growth strategy across the continents, which Caiazzi says, hits the sweet spot for chairman, Dario Pardi. He brings the team together once a month to talk about what’s working and what’s not, how to ramp up successes more quickly and learn from any mistakes.

The challenges of transformation keep it agile – not least in the area of instant payments as major disrupters, such as Uber, radically change the way things work.

“If a payment system is message-based and it’s in near real-time, a number of systems in banks may also need to change, which is, I think, challenging,” says Caiazzi. “We are talking about real-time anti-money laundering (AML), real-time know your

We think the next trend

is going to be Cloud-based, and we intend to be a leader there

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