Gold Magazine January - February 2014, Issue 34 | Page 33

Gold: Can you give us a few basic
facts and figures about TSYS?
Michalis Michaelides: TSYS is a leading payment solutions provider, providing both licensed and outsourced payment processing solutions to financial
institutions, businesses and governments
around the globe. Today we have approximately 400 clients in more than
80 countries. We are an independentlytraded NYSE listed company that continues year-on-year to be a financially
strong company – 2012 revenues were
around $1.87 billion and 2013 has been
a special year for us as we celebrated our
30th anniversary.
We are a Fortune 1000 company and
were named one of the World’s Most
Ethical Companies by Ethisphere magazine in 2013. We employ more than
9,300 team members, of which approximately 250 are based in Nicosia and
we’re known for our ‘people-centered
payments’ brand. On average, we can
say the people of TSYS and our proven
solutions help process 41 million payment transactions a day...more than 15
billion enterprise-wide transactions a
year!
Gold: What services does TSYS provide to customers? Can you explain
the processes in the financial transaction system where TSYS is involved
and how precisely?
M.M.: One of our taglines is ‘The action behind the transaction’ which is
exactly what we do…for every payment
transaction whether it be for a cup of
coffee or for a vacation, our solutions
are often behind the scenes making it
happen. Basically, we provide solutions
for financial institutions issuing all types
of products such as credit, charge, debit,
prepaid and loyalty cards to consumers
or commercial cards catering to corporate customers. We also provide acquiring financial institutions solutions for
managing their ATM networks, their
physical merchants and e-commerce
merchants. Our solutions connect the
banks, card networks (such as Visa,
MasterCard and Amex), merchants and
card holders to direct the movement of
money across these multiple parties. A
payment transaction at a point of sale
(POS) when you swipe or tap your card
at a physical merchant or pay over the

Our Cyprus
office plays
a crucial role
in the overall
support of
our licensing
business
Internet (via a payment gateway) can
be supported by TSYS, as we help process the payment message for real-time
authorization and later for clearing and
settlement. Our solutions help deliver
the services you receive, through support
for loyalty/ points schemes and new card
applications, through to the fraud and
risk management systems such as realtime SMS alerts that are put in place to
protect you.
Gold: What are your current available
products?
M.M.: In the licensing space, we provide a comprehensive suite of products
under the PRIME brand. Clients have
the ability to create a tailor-made solution that fits their needs and requirements. We also provide a comprehensive
outsourcing business model in which
the solution resides within one of our
state-of-the-art data centres around the
world. The breadth and depth of our
solutions span the entire payments value
chain, from card and merchant management, through to authorization, clearing
and settlement, risk and fraud management, to loyalty and ecommerce.
Gold: How does PRIME work and
what makes it more efficient than
other similar products?
M.M.: PRIME supports both card issuing and merchant acquiring on a
single platform. It supports multiple
currencies, multiple languages, multiple
products (e.g. credit, debit, prepaid,
virtual, loyalty, instalment cards), multichannel acquiring and multiple payment
schemes all on one platform rather than
fragmented platforms. Its architecture is

designed to allow it to scale up and its
unique integration layer has created an
interoperable basis for a rapidly growing number of value added services that
benefit and help differentiate our clients’
products and services and, ultimately,
you the consumer. TSYS’ innovation
and R&D investment in PRIME has
created an extremely rich functionality
that draws from a global footprint of
approximately 130 clients across more
than 70 countries, and this helps define
it as a leading platform for innovation.
Gold: For which type of client is
PRIME the best solution?
M.M.: That’s the beauty of PRIME; it’s
scalable from small-to-mid-to large scale
financial institutions. Multinational clients use it to centralize their cards operations across multiple geographies. Even
retailers can use the solution to offer
their clients financial products. We are
using industry best practices for product development and have developed
a unique integration layer that enables
the platform to be enriched with much
lower resource and financial investment.
This allows it to be more cost-effective
for a wider range of banks in addition
to those with multi-country expansion
strategies for both developed and emerging markets. I think it is worth mentioning that our Cyprus office plays a
crucial role in the overall support of our
licensing business.
Gold: Why was Cyprus chosen as one
of the 6 European locations of TSYS?
M.M.: Our Cyprus office was part of
Card Tech Limited (CTL), a UK-based
payments company, which back in the
early nineties developed the 1st PCbased card management system in the
world, the forerunner for PRIME. The
office was established in 1989 and Cyprus proved to be a great strategic location to support its expanding client base
across multiple continents and it grew
to be the largest office for Card Tech in
the world. Card Tech was acquired in
July 2006 – in what was considered one
of the largest foreign investments in Cyprus’ IT business at that time – and the
island continues to be a valuable location in terms of servicing clients across
multiple regions and also in terms of the
high level of quality IT expertise that

THE INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT, FINANCE & PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MAGAZINE OF CYPRUS

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Gold 33

08/01/2014 09:51