What's new?

The clearing of card based transactions through ACH based clearing methods is an important part of the domestic clearing volume in many countries throughout the SEPA region. The SEPA payment infrastructure defined by EPC does not support yet the clearing of card based transactions. The Berlin Group has started to work on business process definitions and message formats for such a SEPA Card Clearing Scheme. This Clearing Scheme is meant to support all SEPA compliant card schemes and is strictly separated from card scheme rules, a fact which supports an unbundling of processing and card scheme management. The main decisions and characteristics of such a clearing scheme as a workpath is described in a White Paper issued on the web-site of the Berlin Group.

The Berlin Group Interface Specifications in version 2 are a stable specification as interfaces for bilateral card processing throughout Europe. They are used now for a while by different processors, compare the implementation status report on this web site. Therefore, change requests on these specifications between two releases of the specification might have impact on running systems, let it be minor technical change requests on the field definitions or major functional extensions. The Berlin Group has decided to formalize the change management for these change needs. The Change Management Procedure defined for the Berlin Group Interface Specifications are published now.

The Berlin Group is currently working on several issues like a new release of the specifications which will support full credit card processing or the clearing of card transactions via the new SEPA clearing infrastructure. Following the aims of transparency to the market, the Berlin Group is now publishing a detailed workplan for 2008 on this web site.

In January 2008, the Berlin Group decided to publish the implementation status of Berlin Group Acquiring or Issuing Gateways in quarterly reports. The status report indicates running implementation projects, the processors involved and the number of POS terminals, ATMs and cards connected to the corresponding Berlin Group Gateways in production. Also transaction volumes are reported, independent of the brand processed.

In January 2008 the PAN Nordic Card Association (PNC), the organisation for banks working with payment cards in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, has confirmed its active participation in the work of the Berlin Group. PNC participates already since May 2007 in the meetings of the Berlin Group. PNC is by this enrolment following the objectives for the PNC, to promote the borderless card market and its role as being a forum for co-ordination and co-operation of the infrastructure.

MBU Ltd. was established at the initiative of Croatian banks in 1994 in purpose to provide comprehensive support in card business and electronic payments through its infrastructure - MB/NET/, based on state of the art technology and solutions implemented and certified by leading international card organizations. The result of a joint effort of Croatian banks using MB/NET/ is MB/CARD/ a domestic debit card scheme. As most banks applied international Maestro logo on MB/CARD/ creating MB/CARD//Maestro card which can be usable on all ATMs and EFTPOS terminals marked with Maestro or Cirrus acceptance in Croatia and abroad. As a leading payment service provider in Croatia, offering for banks services such as bank card issuing, card acceptance at ATMs, EFTPOS terminals, bank counters, on the Internet and by telephone, MBU becomes recognizable as a one of the leading processors in the region.

Giro Bankcard cPlc. (GBC) was founded 15 years ago to build and operate IT systems supporting Hungarian domestic bankcard issuing and acquiring as well as settlement of transactions. GBC has been acquired by Societa per i Servizi Bancari S.p.A. (SSB) in January 2007 and it operates as a clearing house for financial institutions. GBC operates as an independent service provider, currently offering multibank services for 17 domestic banks, 163 savings and co-operative banks, 2 international financial institutions, 15 health funds and 2 financial service providers. GBC processes MasterCard and Visa transactions as well as Amex, Diners, JCB and proprietary cards together with DKV, UTA, LOMO and Routex fuel card transactions originated at petrol stations.

BORICA was established in 1993 by Bulgarian National Bank with the main objective to build a national infrastructure for card payments in the country. BORICA is owned by Bulgarian National Bank and 22 local banks and as a national card payments system operator and the interbank card payments switch it is servicing 26 local banks. The main activity of the company is the authorization of card payments, switching the card payments authorizations between local banks and other card processors abroad, personalization of magstripe and chip cards. BORICA is also functioning as an intermediary for the execution of the final settlement of interbank card transactions between the banks and Bulgarian National Bank and it is a third party processor company for MasterCard, Visa and American Express (for the ATM acquiring) for the banks that are issuing their cards through BORICA.

National Payment Card Centre (NPCC) is a part of the National Bank of Serbia and is currently working on the development of the Serbian national payment card system - DinaCard. DinaCard system was founded in 2003, in close cooperation between the National Bank of Serbia and commercial banks. At this point, market share of the DinaCard system in the Serbian payment card markets equals approximately 30 % and all commercial banks functioning in Serbia are members of the system. Apart from leading the project of the national payment card, NPCC is also in charge of routing transactions in DinaCard system through the central switching system, as well as performing financial settlement between domestic banks in all major payment card schemes present in the Serbian card market (DinaCard, VISA , MasterCard and YUBA).

Based on the experiences from implementation projects the IP VPN Requirements have been revised and a complete set of documents for self-certification has been developed.

Following the revision of the IP VPN Specifications by the IP VPN Task Force of the Berlin Group, Version 2.0 of the "Minimum Requirements for IP based networks" has been developed based on the experiences from different implementation projects and has been agreed on by the Implementation Task Force and the VPN Task Force.

In addition to this the Implementation Task Force of the Berlin Group has developed a document "Minimum Requirements for Certification" as a documentation of the self-certification process which should be used by gateways implementing the Berlin Group specifications. The document contains the process description, a concept for functional testing, test-cases for integration testing and a common security policy.

The main document describes the self certification process to be followed by Berlin Group gateways and explains the responsibilities for internal and bilateral testing. Functional requirements are detailed in a comprehensive concept which considers different implementation phases and testing priorities. For integration testing, a common set of test cases is defined as an excel sheet, enabling the testing partners to evaluate their test results in parallel. In addition to this a common security policy has been defined as a common reference for implementation. The test case catalogue has been checked positively by the Clearing Task Force and the Authorisation Task Force of the Berlin Group, the security policy has been agreed on by the Security Task Force of the Berlin Group.

To provide additional guidance to interested implementers the Implementation Task Force has developed an Implementation Master Plan, outlining the major work packages of a project for the implementation of a Berlin Group gateway (attachment 4). The document is intended to support interested parties in their development projects as a kind of checklist for setting up implementation projects.

All documents are provided for download via the Berlin Group website.

During 2006 the first European card processors have implemented the Berlin Group Interfaces. The implementation projects showed that some optimizations and clarifications within the clearing specifications would be suitable. These change requests have been taken into account during the preparation of the newly published version 2.0 of the Clearing Specification. All current implementation projects already follow this new version of the specification.

On that occasion the Clearing Specifications have been reorganised. The Clearing Interface Specification document describes the clearing interface and the data flow, based on ISO 8583. The scheme-independent technical processing rules are documented separately now in a Rules document. This document also contains a complete process description as well as a generic clearing data model supported by the Berlin Group interface.

In the first half of 2007 a Procedures Handbook will be published to complete the clearing specifications.

In December BKM, the Interbank Card Center of 28 banks and financial institutions in Turkey, has confirmed its active participation in the work of the Berlin Group. BKM participates already since September 2006 in the meetings of the Berlin Group.

BKM was established in 1990 with the partnership of 13 public and private Turkish banks for the purpose to provide solutions to common problems and to further develop the rules and standards of credit and debit cards in Turkey, within the card payment system. With strong infrastructure and personnel, BKM is unique in its field and provides outstanding services to its members.

The interbank clearing of card transactions is carried out within BKM's structure through the domestic clearing and settlement of debit and credit card transactions. The main activities of BKM are: carrying out the authorization operation between the banks, developing the procedures applicable to the banks in the credit card and debit card sector, forming the domestic rules and regulations, making efforts in relation to provision of standardization and taking the relevant decisions, establishing relations with the international organizations and commissions and representing the members in these organizations when necessary and executing the ongoing bank operations from a single central operation site in a more secure, fast and cost-effective manner.

Laser Card Services Ltd., the company behind the only debit card scheme operating in the Republic of Ireland currently, has announced its decision to become a member of the Berlin Group. The choice to join the Berlin Group as a participant was made by the Laser Board following an informative presentation to the Board of Directors of the scheme by Zentraler Kreditausschuss (ZKA) on the standardisation initiative.

Laser, the only debit card solution currently available in the Republic of Ireland, has provided a suitable and efficient alternative to cash and cheque use in the Irish market place since 1996. Laser is now the payment method of choice for some 80 million retail purchases per annum.

Market penetration has grown by 17% since July ´05 and it is expected that by the end of 2006, almost 1.5 million people will have a Laser Card. This will represent 55% of the total population of 18-64 year olds in the country.

Scheme estimates indicate that Laser payments will have accounted for over €6.2billion worth of retail sales in over 47,000 stores throughout the Republic of Ireland by December 2006.

In April 2006, the European Commission issued its Interim Report on the Payment Cards Sector Inquiry in which it refers to the importance of the development of technical standards in the field of card payments. The European Commission Report stated that the existing divergent technical standards for message protocols and security requirement in national and international schemes are regarded as a technical barrier to competition in the field of card payments at the European level and that common open standards protocols would significantly facilitate cross-border integration and competition.

The Berlin Group has launched an industry-driven initiative to define a standard issuer-acquirer interface for card transactions in Europe. The Berlin Group believes that its standardisation efforts will be a major contribution to achieve the aims of the European Commission with regard to technical standardisation in the payments market.

This Berlin Group initiative represents, for the first time, the development of an acquirer-issuer interface specification for processing card transactions, which is non-proprietary and independent of any specific national or international payment scheme. In addition, the policy of the Berlin Group is to put its specifications into the public domain, thereby contributing to the aim of the European Commission to achieve a common technical acquirer-issuer interface standard in the cards market in Europe.

As part of the current implementations of the Berlin Group specifications, the management procedures and processes are being created for the on-going maintenance and development of the interface standard.

As a further contribution to the development of common European standards for the issuer to acquirer-domain, the Berlin Group has launched a further initiative on data format standards for card payments, to ensure that the infrastructure currently under development for the processing of Direct Debits and Credit Transfers can also be used also for clearing and settlement of card transactions in the future. This will enable the development of a standardized technical infrastructure for clearing and settlement of all kinds of payment transactions at a European level.

The Berlin Group standardisation initiatives are open to all national and international card schemes and processors, operating in the European cards market.

Based on the experiences from current implementation projects as well as on input from various partners the Berlin Group Clearing Specifications have been reviewed by the Clearing Task Force of the Berlin Group and a revised version 1.1 has been released for download via the Berlin Group web-site. The changes in the new version mainly relate to errors or to clarifications compared to the previous version.

With its Implementation Task Force the Berlin Group takes care that experiences from current implementation projects are shared between the participants of the Berlin Group and that they are mirrored in the specifications provided by the Berlin Group. Any change request generated by the Implementation Task Force is reviewed by the respective technical Task Force (Clearing, Authorisation, VPN, Security) prior to publication of a revised version of the specification. As such the maintenance process for the specifications ensures participation of any interested party.

In March 2006, LINK, the UK national ATM switch, and EUFISERV, the Europe-wide card transaction switch have confirmed their active participation in the Berlin Group. Both organisations have been participating in the meetings of the Berlin Group and have now decided to formalise their membership in the Berlin Group. This commitment supports the ongoing work of the Berlin Group in the further development and maintenance of interface standards between card payments acquirers and issuers, which will facilitate system interoperability at a pan-European level.

LINK is one of the world's leading transaction processors and operator of the UK's national ATM interchange system, providing the technology and commercial services (including settlement) that make inter-company ATM sharing possible. The LINK Scheme brings together 102 million card holders and 58,000 ATMs in the UK and provides a 24-hour, 365-days a year, online, fully authorised transaction processing and settlement service.

LINK's multi-currency and multi scheme capability delivers continuous real time payments processing to banking and corporate customers. The Company has recently (November 2005) been appointed to develop and operate the UK's first real-time account-to-account, "any value" C2C or C2B payment service.

More information can be found at www.link.co.uk.

EUFISERV s.c.r.l. is a card payments processor that manages the EUFISERV Network, processing cross-border ATM cash withdrawals and point of sale transactions between its users. It is a Brussels based company owned by retail banks from thirteen different countries and by the European Savings Banks Group (ESBG). Its mission is to develop, maintain and operate international financial services for the whole financial industry.

Today, it operates a Europe-wide information technology infrastructure allowing more than 70 million banks cardholders to withdraw local currency from over 60,000 ATMs. In addition, EUFISERV has Gateways to the systems of Visa International, MasterCard, American Express and, since very recently, also to China UnionPay allowing banks to also accept these cards at their ATMs. In addition, these Gateways allow banks to provide their customers with the ATM card services of these organizations.

More information can be found at www.eufiserv.com.

APSS (Austrian Payment Systems Services) is a service provider for electronic payment systems for more than 25 years now. Until recently completely owned by the Austrian banks, APSS is now positioned as an independent payment processor for card organisations and banks. Besides processing of around 372 million transactions in 2004, APSS provides the terminal network for Austria and is a highly specialized software developer in the field of card based payment systems.