Unisys Nederland
 

UPSS: CE BPO focus for GMS

Introduction

Starting in 2004, Unisys Global Managed Services (GMS) has focused its Continental European (CE) payments BPO activities in the 100% Unisys subsidiary UPSS. Recognizing the unique combination of skills and market knowledge which is a requirement for a successful BPO operation, Unisys not only decided to concentrate all its CE BPO payments operations within UPSS, but also to further develop the company along the lines of a factory delivering a utility service.

UPSS heritage

UPSS was founded after Unisys acquired the paper based payments processing part of the Interpay (now Equens) organization in The Netherlands in 2004. Interpay, as national clearing house in The Netherlands, had been in this business from 1994 on. Over the past years, UPSS has gained market share in both The Netherlands and Belgium, and is now the largest bank independent paper based payment processor in both countries.

Market Strategy

Unisys has structured these activities into a separate organization, fully owned by the company, called Unisys Payment Services & Solutions  (UPSS).  Unisys positions UPSS as an outsourcing utility, with banks sharing common costs for the processing and image archiving of giro payments, credit card paper slips and other paper payment documents.  Unisys aims to extend this business utility model to banks in Benelux and across Europe. This policy is in line with the positioning in the UK of  iPSL, a Unisys company which handles nearly 70 percent of all checks processed in the UK for banks as Barclay’s, Lloyds TSB, and HSBC. 

Benefits

Since it’s deployment, the UPSS utility has provided its bank clients with a number of benefits:

  • Stable unit costs for document processing: UPSS’s current bank customers benefit from stable unit costs despite declining paper volumes.
  • Access to new technology without the capital investment: For many individual banks, investment in new imaging and document management technologies is difficult to justify given declining volumes of paper-based transactions.  Outsourcing such services to a utility allows banks to benefit from technology and process improvements with a variable cost structure and without capital investment.
  • Centralized fraud prevention: By concentrating the processing of paper-based payment transactions in one utility, fraud prevention is optimized and delivered at a lower cost to banks.  Rather than each bank implementing their own fraud prevention solution, they can now leverage UPSS’s utility service. 

Quality standards

UPSS is committed to provide the highest quality of service to its customers. That’s why our processes are underpinned by SLAs and managed in line with ITIL standards. We report to clients at fixed intervals on performance, based on SLAs. This ensures that UPSS’ performance is measurable, predictable and clearly documented. As a result we have been a Near Zero Error company for the past ten years. Our service level agreements commit us to a maximum error rate of 0.005%. We have demonstrated an auditable track record of meeting SLAs to an exceptionally high standard. And these are only a few of the reasons financial services providers should consider transferring their document services to UPSS.

Compliance

As UPSS delivers services to Dutch and European financial institutions it has to comply with national and international rules and regulations. All processes and activities at UPPS comply with these regulations. In addition, UPSS meets all the requirements the De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch Central Bank) has set out and is also supervised by the Dutch Central Bank.

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