Celent cards research is now published

About a year ago, I decided to embark on a journey of researching vendors and service providers in card management and transaction processing (CMTP). While I have been writing extensively about emerging payments (and will continue to do so), the reality is that many of these payments still rely on cards and the supporting infrastructures. Yet, as the transaction types proliferate, some of those older infrastructures are struggling to cope. If I were at a bank looking to either establish or upgrade our CMTP capabilities, I would want to know: What options do I have? How should I approach the challenge? Who can I turn to for help? The good news is that banks and other institutions seeking help with card management and transaction processing technologies don’t have to face the challenge alone. Depending on their requirements, they can enlist help from packaged software vendors, issuer processors and professional services firms. It has been a massive undertaking, but I am pleased to announce that today Celent published four new reports with details on CMTP vendors. We engaged with over 30 vendors and there is a lot of detail - the reports collectively go to nearly 300 pages. Part I is an overview of the vendor landscape, and Parts II-IV have detailed vendor profiles for 27 companies below:

• 11 packaged software vendors: ACI Worldwide, BPC, Compass Plus, CSC, Intellect, NCR Alaric, OpenWay, Sopra, Sungard, TAS Group and Tieto.
• 8 issuer processors: First Data, FIS, Fiserv, HP, Jack Henry, MasterCard, Nets and TSYS.
• 8 professional services firms: Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Mphasis, TCS, and Wipro.

I hope and expect that these reports will be a great resource for everyone in the payments industry, and would like to thank all the firms that participated in this research - their effort was non-trivial. If you are a Celent client, you should be able to access the reports directly. Otherwise, please get in touch with us at info@celent.com.