The key challenges facing customer centric business today in Finance, Retail and Telco are cost reductions and revenue generation.

Cutting costs and building market share requires technological and business innovation as organizations seek new ideas for customer marketing systems, particularly ‘card’ based, realizing the value of the information which is available yet ignored.

Logica is working closely with blue chip organizations to address the issues that are central to gaining competitive advantages out of a constantly changing environment. The WM-card applications, originally developed by WM-data, are at the forefront of technology advances delivering a unique set of card applications that overcome the restrictions of the legacy infrastructure.

We have been building and implementing card payment solutions since 1979. With extensive experience in implementing systems for the financial and retail card services market with major customers across the Nordic region, Europe, Asia/Pacific and South America, as Logica we will continue to broaden that experience with new opportunities.

Business Drivers
The payments sector is an ever-changing world through technological advances - smart cards are replacing cash, credit and debit card usage is climbing as cash-back facilities compete with ATMs. Internet consumer payments have created a whole new sub-market for authentication and contributed furthermore to increase the diversity of the payment solutions. Encryption methods are constantly being upgraded and place extra demands on transaction processing service levels and equipment suppliers.

Today, a significant number of all payments are card based and this will undoubtedly continue to grow. The need for secure, high performance transaction processing systems available 7x24 is obvious. The marketing focus is moving to customers and service, maximizing the value of transaction acquisition with sophisticated CRM tools.

Card processing requires an advanced technology platform to enable the user to leverage new technology and marketing initiatives as they evolve whilst protecting existing investments.

WM-card
We have developed a unique card management product using the latest technologies – ‘expert’ system, SQL, and client/server. WM-card is a set of ‘building blocks’ which includes message switching, authorization and transaction acquisition, on-line loyalty, revolving credit, transaction pricing, invoicing and accounts receivable, comprehensive customer and card management functionality including card issuing, merchant management and issuer settlement.

ALL products operate within a single environment on the HP NonStop™ platform reducing operational costs, management and replication of data to an absolute minimum.

Key features of WM-card are flexibility, simplicity, and ease of use. The benefits of CRM are well known – the issue has been the damage caused by confused data ownership, information duplication and the knowledge gaps caused by the diverse technologies and platforms. The WM-card products provide the enabling technology to capture the comprehensive demographic information from the transaction data and process that information using a variety of CRM, ERP and OLAP tools and services, while at the same time providing the tools to implement new marketing initiatives quickly and cost effectively.

New challenges
We will continue to enhance the products as new technology becomes available. The EMV standard (Europay / MasterCard / Visa) is a global standard for making sure that chip card installations are secure and interoperable. The standards are being developed under cooperation between MasterCard and Visa and the WM-card products are EMV compliant. In addition, we are working with major international retailers and card issuers to introduce the new on-line settlement functionality. The new security requirement of triple DES encryption technology (with double length keys and secured "MACed" key-blocks using the Atalla Key Block") has already been implemented into customer solutions. More recently, the product has been brought forward to meet the new PCI regulations.

As new technologies and standards emerge, WM-card is ideally architected to take advantage with the minimum of disruption.