31/05/2011
By Scott Thompson
CEDICAM, the payment flow and systems subsidiary of the Crédit Agricole Group, has selected Accenture to implement a new IT platform. This will process the collection of European payments under the SEPA Direct Debit scheme.
The 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 to help implement the platform, based upon the Open Payment Framework (OPF) solution of Clear2Pay, and to consolidate its multiple payment systems. “Accenture has been helping Crédit Agricole since 2007 to define and execute its roadmap for restructuring its payment operations and systems,” says Eric Sorin, deputy CEO at 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 programmes played a critical role in making this project a success.”
