SAP worked with requirements provided by Postbank to develop the SAP Payment Engine, an application for industry-wide use in effectively processing mass volumes of payments. The announcement was made at Sibos, the world's premier financial services event, being held in Vienna, Austria, September 15-18.

Postbank is a long-time SAP customer and the first customer to implement SAP core banking solutions. Its subsidiary Betriebs-Center fur Banken AG (BCB) is the largest payment transaction firm in Germany, servicing four out of Germany's five biggest banks and has a market share of over 20 percent.

Processing vast amounts of payments on one platform not only enables Postbank to have a lower total cost of ownership, but also provides revenue opportunities to expand its client base into the pan-European marketplace. As pressure builds from the impending SEPA regulation, banks are striving to be prepared for this mandate. With the SAP Payment Engine, Postbank has a modern, scalable payment processing platform, with standardized processes and clear interfaces to create a common, cross-enterprise payment IT infrastructure that supports its strategy of becoming one of the leading payment processing providers in Europe.

"By 2010, a significant volume of all European payment transactions will be already executed in the SEPA standard," said Dr. Mario Daberkow, executive board member, Services, Postbank. "The payment engine has been developed to quickly implement future SEPA formats, once these regulations are enacted. With that adaptation already built in, our growth as an in-sourcer of back office services in Europe now has no technical limitations."

SAP Payments Engine Serves as a Central Hub For All Payment Activities, Helping Banks Achieve Operational Excellence

The SAP Payment Engine is built on a scalable and flexible platform developed to help banks achieve operational excellence through significant cost savings, improved service and operational efficiency. It is multi-bank and multi-channel enabled in order to support in-sourcing business models that allow banks and service providers to offer payment processing to various in-house entities. In addition, banks using SAP Payment Engine can offer white-labeled services to other banks, bringing additional revenues and lower unit cost for in-sourcing offerings.

"This project was an amazing process where great minds from Postbank and SAP came together to share knowledge to develop a high performance payments machine," said Johan Kestens, senior vice president, Line of Business Financial Services, SAP AG. "The highly motivated team effort resulted in very positive outcomes not only for supporting the needs of Postbank, but also in the development of a payments engine that other banks or service providers can now utilize."

The SAP Payment Engine application offers a single payment operations platform to streamline all payment processes across a bank, and standardizes interfaces to surrounding applications in order to allow the creation of a central payments hub. The SAP Payment Engine application is based on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, unifying application infrastructure and integration components. SAP NetWeaver is compatible with banks' existing IT infrastructure, easing integration and consolidation. The platform is based on industry standards like XML, Java and Web Services, and can be integrated with commonly used technologies such as Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere.