Tietoevry has completed a major systems’ upgrade for one of Serbia’s leading payment processors, Chip Card to deal with soaring transaction volumes in the region.
In a statement, the firm said it had implemented Card Suite switching & clearing infrastructure to decrease the execution time of clearing services and eliminate the risk of downtime in the processing system.
With electronic payments becoming more popular in Serbia and adjacent markets in the Balkans, payment processors are having to ensure they can deal with a growing volume of transactions.
Last October, Serbian central bank Governor Jorgovanka Tabakovic said that the number of cashless payments had increased by more than 250 percent in Serbia over the past five years. A year earlier, at the Belgrade Economic Forum, Vira Platonova, Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager for Visa CISSEE, highlighted that contactless payments were by far the preferred in-store payment method, with 8 out of 10 face-to-face Visa card transactions in Serbia now contactless.
With open banking and API bringing new tech and financial players to the SEE region the upgrade to Chip Card’s infrastructure could be considered a timely move. Among the active card schemes in Serbia are its domestic players such as Dina Card, as well as major international companies such as VISA, Mastercard and Union Pay International.
“From every angle, this system upgrade was an important step in enhancing Chip Card service offering and preparing for future growth. Thanks to the upgraded architecture we have introduced, transactions are faster, the risk of downtime is reduced, and ongoing operational costs are lower,” said Valdis Janovs, Head of Instant, Retail Payments and Cards at Tietoevry.
“But best of all, Banks are now having highly available uninterrupted service offerings from Chip Card, which is critical in digital payments growing in volume and importance. Looking ahead, we have also introduced the capacity in Chip Card to tokenize payments via VISA’s VTS or Mastercard’s MDES products.”
