Crédit Agricole's Subsidiary Launches SEPA Payment Processing Platform
Cedicam, the payments flow and systems subsidiary of the Crédit Agricole Group, has launched a new payment processing platform with the help of Accenture. Accenture was selected to implement the new IT platform for the group to process the collection of European payments under the single euro payments area (SEPA) Direct Debit scheme (SDD), as required by the European Commission (EC) and the French regulator.
Crédit Agricole’s new platform centralises SEPA direct debit collections for Crédit Agricole’s several French regional IT payment systems, and processes payment transactions for many of the group’s banks. It also enables the company to process high volumes of payments more rapidly and cost-efficiently through a single IT platform and accelerates the time it takes to launch new and greater value-added payment products and services, particularly for the group’s corporate customers.
Accenture was selected by Crédit Agricole in 2009 to help implement the platform, based upon the Open Payment Framework (OPF) solution of Clear2Pay, a payment technology vendor, and to consolidate Crédit Agricole’s multiple payment systems.
“Accenture has been helping Crédit Agricole since 2007 to define and execute its roadmap for restructuring its payment operations and systems,” said Eric Sorin, deputy chief executive officer (CEO) of Crédit Agricole Cedicam. “With the implementation of the SDD scheme on 1 November 2010, we achieved a key milestone with the deployment of our group’s platform, thus contributing to realise our ambition to be a leader in the payments business in Europe and reinforcing our leadership position in France. Accenture’s knowledge of the payments business and its experience with complex, large-scale systems integration programs played a critical role in making this project a success.”