Insights

Milan, September 14, 2021 – TAS Group, (Italian Stock Exchange: TAS), a global provider of innovative solutions in card management, digital payments, financial messaging and capital markets, has announced that it has been ranked among the Top 100 in the 2021 IDC FinTech Rankings for the 13th consecutive year. This annual vendor ranking represents the leading hardware, software and service providers to the financial services industry from around the world. Vendors are ranked based on 2020 calendar year revenues attributed to financial institutions.

“Being named in the IDC FinTech Rankings is a significant accomplishment, demonstrating a provider’s commitment to the success of its financial institution clients,” states Marc DeCastro, Research Director at IDC Financial Insights. “The IDC Fintech Rankings, now in its 18th year, is the global standard list of fintech providers to the industry, and we congratulate the 2021 winners.”

Executive Chairman of TAS Group, Dario Pardi, remarked, "We are proud to be firmly positioned, year after year, between the top financial technology providers in this prestigious ranking. 2020 was a year marked by extraordinary events and consequently particularly demanding and challenging. Nevertheless, we closed it with significant growth in revenue and margins, thanks to our continuous commitment to investing in human capital and offering renewal. This enables us to successfully bring competitive and technologically advanced solutions to the Financial Industry." 

The Financial Services ecosystem, an industry in which IDC Financial Insights forecasts worldwide spending on IT across the globe to reach $590 billion (USD) by 2025, is changing at an unprecedented pace. Well-funded new market entrants, as well as big tech companies, have raised the bar for all providers. TAS Group’s efforts are heavily focused towards accelerating challengers’ next-gen financial experiences implementations, while supporting incumbent customers in meeting disruption with modernization and staying agile and responsive through TAS’s outstanding technology and expertise.

At Eurosystem level, TAS keeps strengthening its key role in supporting Europe’s financial community meeting the deadlines of the T2/T2S Consolidation in 2022 and the wider upcoming challenges, such as the migration towards ISO20022 and the new centralized ECMS infrastructure planned to go live in 2023.

In the Issuing and Acquiring domain, TAS continues to lead the way towards the seamless convergence between cards and alternative payments through its cloud-native, Open API-based platform PayStorm, adopted by a growing FinTech customer base throughout Europe and the Americas.

Among TAS’s strengths is the flexibility to adapt to the needs of customers and partners, guaranteed by its solutions and delivery models that promptly evolve with new regulations, market trends and technologies.

Sophia Antipolis, 24 June 2021 - TAS Group unveils a new brand and a new service line: TAS Group Cloud Services. The operational heart of TAS Group's SaaS and cloud services is concentrated in the Sophia-Antipolis Datacentre supported by other Datacentres in Europe (Milan, Bologna, Paris). By virtue of the large SME clientele with which it has worked since 1997, TAS France, the French subsidiary of TAS Group has developed a unique expertise in offering flexible, tailor-made hosting and housing solutions adapted to the different stages of the digital transition of businesses. TAS Group Cloud Services combines all this know-how that companies have been benefiting from for many years. Thanks to the synergy with TAS Group as a whole, TAS France can now go beyond regional borders and operate on a global scale, providing innovative solutions that reinforce the independence of SMEs and the protection of their data. Its IT outsourcing value propositions are adapted to each company context (business activity, existing infrastructure, organization, projects, ...) thanks to the provision of added value services to meet the new technical, regulatory and data protection requirements imposed by the challenges of digital technology. Therefore, TAS France is certified ISO 9001, ISO 27001 (information security), HDS (health data protection) and PCI-DSS (credit card data protection), resulting in a superior level of certification in terms of quality of service and data protection. In addition, a SOC (Security Operation Centre) prevents, identifies and tracks cyber-attacks and anomalies detected on the network, which could cause a risk to the company's business continuity. Francesco de Simoni, General Manager of TAS France, commented: "Until now, TAS Group's cloud service offerings were not grouped under a single name. Given the growing demand for services in this area and the quality of TAS Group's offer, we decided to communicate our value proposition more clearly ". Download the press release

Milan (Italy), 22 June 2021– Flywallet S.r.l. (“Flywallet”), the innovative startup that created a digital platform for enabling payments and services through wearable devices with biometric authentication, has signed a reserved investment agreement for the entry of Global Payment S.p.A. (“GP”), a subsidiary of TAS Group’s mother company TAS S.p.A., into the capital with a minority stake.

TAS Group is a multinational company, whose payment software solutions are adopted by commercial and central banks throughout Europe and beyond. More than 100 million payment cards are managed by TAS platforms worldwide. Thanks to its leadership, TAS Group will be a vehicle to accelerate the go-to-market for Flywallet’s mobile wallet, the world’s first for tokenizing payment cards on wearables with biometric authentication. The partnership will also result in a commercial agreement under which GP will distribute Flywallet’s wearables and service platform to TAS Group's business customers.

Flywallet’s flagship product is named Keyble, a new type of wearable that adapts to the user’s lifestyle, created with eco-friendly materials and inspired by made-in-Italy styles. It consists of a smart device that can be inserted into fashion accessories such as bracelets or watch straps and is equipped with biometric sensors for user authentication and health monitoring.

Through fingerprints or heartbeat measured via ECG, the user can enable in-store contactless payments, passwordless logins to online services, ticketing, loyalty cards, access to gyms, offices and homes, car door locks, digital identity and more. In early 2022, the wearable will be certified as a medical device capable to perform analysis of cardiac arrhythmias, blood oxygen saturation and body temperature.

Flywallet is proposing a unique “Biometric Wearable Platform as a Service” model for e-money and payment institutions, banks, insurance companies and businesses. By connecting via dedicated APIs, the Flywallet Platform allows Partner companies to deliver new types of digital services easily and securely through the proprietary wearables.

Valentino Bravi, CEO of TAS stated: “At TAS, we have always applied the principles of “continuous innovation” to ensure the market a constant technological and functional evolution of our products and services, both through significant investments in R&D - more than 10% of our revenues in the last decade - and through the acquisition of innovative companies.

In 2019, for example, the acquisition of Mantica enabled us to expand our offerings in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence areas.

Today, we are investing in Flywallet because we are convinced that offering wearable technology that is customizable and adaptable to our customers’ user experiences is a critical success factor.

We also appreciate that this project gives us the opportunity to reaffirm our decades-long commitment to promoting Italian technology in a sector that will undoubtedly improve our lives and make them more secure in the years to come.”

Lorenzo Frollini, Founder and CEO of Flywallet added: “It is an honour for Flywallet to count TAS among its shareholders and partners. Between TAS and Flywallet there is a perfect strategic fit and a total sharing of the company’s core values, including customer centricity and a relentless pursuit of service quality. In the medium term, the strategic partnership with TAS will also allow Flywallet to expand its range of services through the opportunities offered by PSD2.”

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We are proud to announce that the companies TAS SpA and Global Payments SpA have obtained the UNI CEI EN ISO / IEC 27001: 2017 (information security management system) certification, following audits carried out between April and May this year. On this occasion, Mantica srl, the TAS Group company specialized in Machine Learning, also passed the audit with flying colours and obtained the UNI EN ISO 9001: 2015 certification for its quality management system. These latest achievements are added to the already acquired ISO 9001: 2015 certifications by TAS SpA, Global Payments and TAS France, the latter became ISO 27001: 2017 certified already in 2019. We have always invested in the safety of our solutions. This is why we believe the new ISO 27001 certification is fundamental and strategic in a historical moment in which information security issues are crucial in protecting the integrity and security of data in all its forms and guaranteeing the privacy and protection of information, both for the company and our customers. The extension of the ISO 9001 certification also to Mantica for the field of application "Design and provision of specialist consulting services for data analysis, data science, machine learning, including the supply, development, installation and support of dedicated software tools” strengthens TAS's capacity in the AI ​/ML sector, where we are distinguishing ourselves with cutting-edge solutions for the Banking sector. ISO 27001 TAS S.p.A Certification ISO 27001 Global Payments Certification  ISO 27001 TAS France certification

Sophia-Antipolis, France, 9 April 2021 -  In February 2021, Université Côte d'Azur-CNRS Electronics, Antennas and Telecommunications laboratory (LEAT) and TAS Group formed a partnership to test performance and explore prospects for a large-scale deployment of blockchain used to secure and authenticate data for the activation of smart contracts. These new technologies could, for example, revolutionize the way in which claims between connected vehicles are managed in the coming years. A blockchain use case studied at the LEAT laboratory of Université Côte d'Azur, part of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) Today, in the event of a road accident, the insurer consolidates data resulting from a report filled in by hand by the protagonists. This data may be, intentionally or not, incomplete or even false. In the future, a device installed in the vehicle could send data automatically collected on the vehicle (identity and vital functions of the driver, speed, positioning of the vehicles, etc.) to a blockchain. A Smart Contract could then process this data in a completely decentralized, more objective, fairer and more secure manner. The claims for loss and follow-up provided by the insurance company could be triggered automatically based on this data. This use case is the one selected by LEAT for its Smart IoT for Mobility project led by Prof. Verdier, in partnership with Renault Software Labs and Symag (BNP Paribas subsidiary). Started in 2017, it can now count on TAS Group technology to move on to a larger-scale testing phase. Why TAS Group? Through the partnership, TAS Group provides LEAT with a cloud service platform for containerized applications and brings its expertise in application cloudification to the laboratory. LEAT's exploratory work will thus be brought to the Cloud while adapting and respecting the different types of process. This will allow researchers to benefit from a network test architecture to study the behaviour of models developed in their laboratory and very realistically simulate the deployment of their applications. The containerization of the blockchain will allow the use of micro-services to facilitate the deployment and orchestration of the architecture. The solution will also allow the adoption of agile methods based on "DevOps" principles. What is blockchain? A blockchain is like a database in which the information entered is neither editable nor deleted, and is publicly readable and cryptographically secure. Blockchain is based on the principle of collective trust. By entrusting the validation of a transaction to a multiplicity of computers rather than to a human, a fallible trusted third party, the risk of error, fraud or corruption is eliminated. What are Smart Contracts? Smart Contracts are the natural evolution of blockchain. These "smart contracts" are computer programs stored in a blockchain, designed to automatically execute a set of predefined instructions, based on data from the blockchain. They are automatically executed and self-enforcing contracts. They are governed, without possible dispute, by the explicit terms and conditions set out therein, without one or more people, often qualified as trusted third parties, having to intervene to establish their authenticity and trigger the execution. In the case of vehicle insurance contracts, this new generation of contracts could replace traditional contracts in the future. Download the press release

Today the Board of Directors of TAS approved the 2020 consolidated financial statements of the Group. All economic and financial indicators on the rise : total revenues and core revenues respectively at 61.7 million euros and 60.9 million euros. Consolidated net profit up to 8.8 million euros compared to 5.9 million in the previous year. Dario Pardi, chairman of TAS Group, expressed satisfaction and pride for the excellent results achieved in a particularly demanding and challenging year, in which TAS courageously invested in an increase in human resources, demonstrating the Group's consolidated financial capacity. The three main lines of development in 2020 were: the consolidation of strategic collaborations, the inorganic growth with the acquisition of Infraxis AG , a leading player in the world of digital payments in the Swiss and German markets and the important investments in the Group’s platforms and services. Talking about investments, CEO Valentino Bravi underlined the important share of more than 10% of revenues destined in 2020 for the innovation of solutions, which made it possible to progress in the development of the Global Payments Platform offered both on-premise or in PaaS (Platform as a Service) mode, in the completion of the  Aquarius platform for the ESMIG project for the new Target services of the European Central Bank, and in the strengthening of the PaaS delivery model related to the payment and e-money product suites. Read the full press release in the Investor section.