Bancontact/Mister Cash, the well-established and successful Belgian debit card scheme, and SIX Payment Services, a leading European processor of card transactions, have signed a contract regarding the processing of the Bancontact/Mister Cash debit card transactions.
This assignment means that SIX will further expand its presence in the international card business and strengthen its position in this dynamic environment.
Under the terms of this agreement SIX Payment Services will be responsible for the switching of the Bancontact/Mister Cash transactions. The main trigger for launching the tender process was the decision by the shareholders of Bancontact/Mister Cash to make the scheme SEPA compliant and, thus, open the Belgian payment cards market. In 2011 more than one billion transactions were being processed under the Bancontact/Mister Cash scheme, originating from more than 150,000 points of acceptance (POS, ATM, e-commerce, etc).
The agreement covers software development and processing services over several years. The core requirements include switching, clearing and settlement services. The project will be completed in several phases and SIX will re-use as many of the existing components as possible for building the new Bancontact/Mister Cash scheme switch. The new switch infrastructure will be live mid-2013 and as from then Bancontact/Mister Cash will welcome new members. As Bancontact/Mister Cash will become a European payment system, not only will national players but also international participants be invited to take part in the scheme.
Niklaus Santschi, CEO SIX Payment Services, comments: "As market leader in Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg we are pleased that Bancontact/Mister Cash has decided to go for our modern and high-performance processing platform and that we will soon process transactions from Belgium as well."
Kris De Ryck, CEO Bancontact MisterCash Company, adds: Bancontact/Mister Cash is a highly effective, online, real-time, secure and reliable debit card product. We selected SIX Payment Services to deliver our switching infrastructure since we are convinced that they are capable of meeting our stringent requirements also in the European landscape.