Insights

Milan – 9 December 2021 – Cloud and security. These are the keywords TAS Group is focusing on to offer its customers and partners increasingly agile solutions, guaranteeing the highest levels of performance, safety and scalability. TAS Group has been playing a central role in the payments industry for over 35 years. For more than a decade it has been providing Italian and International issuers, acquirers and processors with software solutions validated according to PCI Council compliance standards, and services certified under the PCI-DSS security standard, issued by the PCI Council for payment service providers. With the aim of making its solutions ever easier to adopt and accessible to new players in the Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystem, TAS has developed the GPP - Global Payments Platform, which integrates under a single architectural concept its own offering in the field of cards, account-based payments, transaction banking and financial value chain. Powered by the innovative "as a service" logic in the cloud, the GPP accelerates the delivery of flexible, efficient services to market while responding to changing regulatory requirements. In this roadmap, TAS Group relies on qualified partners, able to guarantee the highest levels of safety and regulatory compliance. This is the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS), to which TAS Group migrated its POS payment acceptance services in early November, successfully submitting itself to the PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider certification, the highest level of PCI certification for payment service providers. The new infrastructure is based on container architecture and makes extensive use of AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Aurora. Among the benefits achieved by the migration, the main ones concern the simplification of Business Continuity, the decreased effort of TAS personnel dedicated to managing infrastructures, but above all the greater flexibility and scalability of the service offered to customers, crucial characteristics for being agile in the face of constantly evolving market conditions. "The world of acquiring and omnichannel payment acceptance is evolving at extremely high rates, both in terms of consumer preferences for the payment method and channel, and in terms of habits and therefore transaction volumes and peaks", explains Massimiliano Quattrocchi, Country Manager of TAS, “For an ISV such as TAS it is essential to constantly develop and evolve its applications, guaranteeing good independence from basic hw / sw infrastructures and the ability to take advantage of the most advanced technologies and innovations offered by the market. We have chosen to rely on AWS for a number of factors, including the PCI certification already obtained by this Cloud Provider which is the market leader in the Finance sector. The support of AWS has been continuous and invaluable in successfully passing the PCI DSS compliance certification in early November, just in time to face the hottest shopping period of the year. " The new POS management configuration offered by TAS relies on the AWS infrastructures located in the Dublin and Frankfurt regions, which are strategic both in terms of geographic positioning and for the characteristics of the services sought by TAS. The transformation path of TAS Group from software solutions supplier to enabler and facilitator of the customers’ business model by providing platforms and tailored "as a service" solutions is a strategic direction launched in recent years by the Group, which sees the Cloud as one of the essential cornerstones. Through the provision of services that can be configured and activated with reduced time to market, while ensuring the customers’ ability to differentiate themselves over competitors, TAS Group has already scored some clear initial results, both in terms of economic performance growth of the Group and in terms of attractiveness for new market operators. Download the press release

The webinar, organized by our Partner Fiserv, is now avaiable on demand …

TAS Group’s POS payment acceptance services have been successfully migrated to the Cloud, with no disruption to the live merchants. The new infrastructure is based on containers (Kubernetes) and makes extensive use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) PaaS services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Aurora.

In addition to the proven advantages typical of the Cloud technology - such as scalability, simplification of Business Continuity, redundancy, the possibility of decreasing the effort dedicated to infrastructure management - the decision to migrate to AWS Cloud was driven by the PCI certification already obtained by this provider, a market leader in the Finance sector.

"AWS Italy has supported our team in a very effective way, both in the design and in the execution of the project," declared Andrea Paolini, IT Infrastructure Manager of TAS Group, "allowing us to obtain the PCI DSS compliance certification at the beginning of November, a few months after the launch of the initiative, and in time to face the hottest period of the year for e-commerce and in-store purchases."

The new service configuration offered by TAS Group is based on AWS regional infrastructures in Dublin, Frankfurt and Milan. The overall infrastructure is also integral part of TAS Global Payment Platform, the highly modular new enterprise payment processing architecture developed by TAS to serve both incumbents and new entrants in the Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystem.

Being able to communicate in a “brand agnostic way” is proving valuable for fintechs who are scaling up their card business in the rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.

TAS Group successfully launched its MNGS proposition in the US Region back in 2020, and has now added a first client leveraging this channel also for VISA transactions.

Thanks to the established partnership with Mastercard, TAS is able to offer simplicity and reduced unitary costs to customers who are building up their volumes supporting their end-customers preferred choice of payment methods.  

SIBOS MEET THE EXPERTS SESSION

The Eurosystem Market infrastructure has recently gone through unprecedented changes: with T2S, TIPS, ESMIG and the Target2 Consolidation we are seeing quite a revolution, maybe for this reason the last step of the programme, ECMS, seems far from the industry spotlights.
The Migration to the European Collateral Management System will mandatory happen in November 2023, with consequences and impacts that may be wider than expected.

Based on ISO20022 standards, with ECMS the central banking collateral mobility takes a step forward, integrates with T2S and Triparty services, providing the opportunity of smoother funding across Europe but requiring higher cybersecurity standards from all participants, new billing standards (CMH-TF) to CSDs and Custodians and better visibility of available liquid assets across the bank’s different businesses.

Many banks have already completed their ECMS assessment: can they afford this evolution keeping manual activities and fragmented processes or does their collateral management need a digital acceleration?

Speakers:

Mario Mendia, Senior Vice President - TAS

Roberto Bruschi, Executive Subject Matter Expert Capital Markets and Treasury - TAS

Watch the webinar

The new release of the Aquarius Securities Settlement module evolves towards an agile and modular management of all the features referred to domestic and international Settlement . The strength of the solution is given by an advanced management of the Standard Settlement Instructions (SSI), which allows the highest rate of Straight Through Processing within the settlement chain. The combination guarantees an innovative, flexible and effective solution, both for Banks that operate directly with CSD / ICSD, and for Banks that use Depositaries or Global Custodians. The application works in perfect synergy and synchronous with Aquarius Cash and Collateral functions, improving the efficiency, response and operational extension of the overall Aquarius platform. With regard to regulatory compliance, a new module has been released to cover CSDR Penalty specifications (whose go-live is scheduled for February 2022). This module allows users to check the calculations received by the CSDs or the Depositaries and, at the same time, verify them with a simulation mechanism. The support provided to the Back Office is complete and allows the customer to better manage the new penalty mechanism, through the following main features:

• immediate loading and management of received reports, whether in standard or proprietary format;
• calculation simulations to verify the penalties applied;
• data extraction to create statistics and highlight the riskiest situations;
• User dashboard, to monitor the daily and monthly trend of the penalty amounts, with aggregated and detailed data reachable with a simple drilldown mechanism;
• penalties total amounts forecasting ;
• Risk Dashboard to highlight potential buy-in situations, with dedicated analysis depending on the financial instrument type.

The CSDR Penalty module also provides features for the transmission of the received information of the daily and monthly reports to the Back Office applications and to any Institutional Customers. Contact our experts to find out more.