Insights

Thanks to the agreement signed with Danish fintech SoftPay, TAS will enable the acquiring of contactless payments from Android mobile devices in Italy. The benefit provided by the SoftPos solution to merchants is simple and immediate: allowing to transform their phones into a ready-to-use payment terminal, without the need for additional certified hardware, thus reducing the heterogeneity and complexity of multi-device management at the point of sale.

The shopping experience is also improved for the buyer, who can complete the payment faster, avoiding long queues at the checkout.

The merchant APP is available on the Google Play Store and can be used in white label mode, or easily integrated with any APP already in use by the merchant.

The solution is certified with Visa and Mastercard, and is also available for mobile wallets - such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay - whose payments are processed in a similar way to standard EMV transactions managed by traditional POS devices. For maximum user security, a specific certified component manages the typing of the PIN on Glass on the Android device, ensuring absolute confidentiality.

The SoftPos solution is offered by TAS to banking operators and their processors as a service in Cloud; in this way the impact on the Service Provider is minimal, avoiding to disrupt the infrastructures already in use to manage the POS channel.

The innovative solution created by TAS for the Tuscany Region over 10 years ago still represents today a best in class platform for accessing debt positions and collecting payments in compliance with the public national pagoPA circuit. This is proved by other important regional administrations such as Lazio, Umbria and Sardinia, having chosen to reuse the same core platform, adapted by TAS to their specific requirements. Similar solutions for pagoPA payments have been provided by TAS through partnerships also to central Public Administrations such as the Italian Medicines Agency, the Ministry of Health and InfoCamere. Based on the PayTAS proprietary framework, the platform has been built to meet the multiple needs of public administrations and any creditor who provides services of public interest, in the provision of end2end collection and payment services, with a technical and operational approach aimed at facilitating the participation of as many administrations as possible into the pagoPA ecosystem. IRIS, the solution created for the Tuscany Region, more specifically addresses and optimizes the following tasks:

• administrative and technical enrollment of public bodies belonging to the Tuscany territory
• standardization of interfaces and integration with the national IO App system, with full reconciliation of receipts
• simplification of the payment experience of the users (citizens and businesses)
• integration with regional apps
• integration with the centralized booking system for public healthcare services (CUP) and the Pharmacies of the Tuscan Health Service.

Particular attention was paid to the multi-channel freamework, based on a rich catalog of APIs covering the most innovative mobile acceptance devices as well as the more traditional ones. The positive track record and the close synergistic collaboration experienced by Tuscany Region with TAS during the last decade triggered the renewed appointment for the maintenance agreement dedicated to the evolution of IRIS for the next years to come. TAS is a leading provider in the digital payments platforms and services for the financial sector, in particular for the latest trends such as Open Banking, PSD2, Instant Payments and Request2Pay. TAS solutions for the B2G space are offered on premises or in cloud, thus allowing minimum in-house and up-front costs. Market operators can design their payment services leveraging a set of standardized and simplified interfaces, including those that integrate Italian Municipalities, which allows for a significant acceleration in public administrations onboarding. The platform customized for PSPs enables the measurement and matching of high service performance levels and continuous process monitoring, and satisfies all integration scenarios with the domestic pagoPA scheme in a scalable and stable way despite the huge and constantly increasing number of payment transactions generated by key sectors such as multi-utilities and public healthcare companies.

Lugano, 9 May 2022 – Infraxis AG, part of TAS Group, a leading technology provider in the Payments space, will be exhibiting at the upcoming UNITI EXPO taking place in Stuttgart from May 17 through 19. We’re proud to be at UNITI 2022, where we’ll be co-exhibiting with CCCBusiness Service AG, our processor partner servicing the top forecourt operators and fuel card issuers in Switzerland and beyond.

The state of the art PayStorm Fuel platform is powering CCC business by supporting leading Fuel Industry operators on a daily basis. Infraxis is continually investing in the PayStorm platform, bringing the challenger bank paradigm to the processing of fleet cards, forecourt acquiring and EV charging apps.

PayStorm efficiently solves challenges associated with acquiring and authorizing fuel card payments through its highly adaptable design, enabling the realization of different business needs within the minimum of time and with the minimum of cost.

“Whether your organization needs to acquire internationally branded cards, perform authorisation against a small to medium sized card portfolio, or to simply to switch out to a card issuer for authorisation, Infraxis has the solution ready to satisfy your processing requirements.”- commented Manfred Thomi, CEO of Infraxis.

At the UNITI Expo Infraxis stand visitors will be able to assess the ease of app integration via APIs for mobile-first onboarding and self-management for both fleet cards and international payment brands.

UNITI Expo, the leading retail petroleum and car wash trade fair in Europe, is finally back in-person, with 4 themed exhibiting areas. Infraxis AG welcomes all interested visitors in Hall 5, the Technology, Payment & Logistic area, at booth 5A20.

Milan – 9 December 2021 – Cloud and security. These are the keywords TAS Group is focusing on to offer its customers and partners increasingly agile solutions, guaranteeing the highest levels of performance, safety and scalability. TAS Group has been playing a central role in the payments industry for over 35 years. For more than a decade it has been providing Italian and International issuers, acquirers and processors with software solutions validated according to PCI Council compliance standards, and services certified under the PCI-DSS security standard, issued by the PCI Council for payment service providers. With the aim of making its solutions ever easier to adopt and accessible to new players in the Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystem, TAS has developed the GPP - Global Payments Platform, which integrates under a single architectural concept its own offering in the field of cards, account-based payments, transaction banking and financial value chain. Powered by the innovative "as a service" logic in the cloud, the GPP accelerates the delivery of flexible, efficient services to market while responding to changing regulatory requirements. In this roadmap, TAS Group relies on qualified partners, able to guarantee the highest levels of safety and regulatory compliance. This is the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS), to which TAS Group migrated its POS payment acceptance services in early November, successfully submitting itself to the PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider certification, the highest level of PCI certification for payment service providers. The new infrastructure is based on container architecture and makes extensive use of AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Aurora. Among the benefits achieved by the migration, the main ones concern the simplification of Business Continuity, the decreased effort of TAS personnel dedicated to managing infrastructures, but above all the greater flexibility and scalability of the service offered to customers, crucial characteristics for being agile in the face of constantly evolving market conditions. "The world of acquiring and omnichannel payment acceptance is evolving at extremely high rates, both in terms of consumer preferences for the payment method and channel, and in terms of habits and therefore transaction volumes and peaks", explains Massimiliano Quattrocchi, Country Manager of TAS, “For an ISV such as TAS it is essential to constantly develop and evolve its applications, guaranteeing good independence from basic hw / sw infrastructures and the ability to take advantage of the most advanced technologies and innovations offered by the market. We have chosen to rely on AWS for a number of factors, including the PCI certification already obtained by this Cloud Provider which is the market leader in the Finance sector. The support of AWS has been continuous and invaluable in successfully passing the PCI DSS compliance certification in early November, just in time to face the hottest shopping period of the year. " The new POS management configuration offered by TAS relies on the AWS infrastructures located in the Dublin and Frankfurt regions, which are strategic both in terms of geographic positioning and for the characteristics of the services sought by TAS. The transformation path of TAS Group from software solutions supplier to enabler and facilitator of the customers’ business model by providing platforms and tailored "as a service" solutions is a strategic direction launched in recent years by the Group, which sees the Cloud as one of the essential cornerstones. Through the provision of services that can be configured and activated with reduced time to market, while ensuring the customers’ ability to differentiate themselves over competitors, TAS Group has already scored some clear initial results, both in terms of economic performance growth of the Group and in terms of attractiveness for new market operators. Download the press release

TAS Group’s POS payment acceptance services have been successfully migrated to the Cloud, with no disruption to the live merchants. The new infrastructure is based on containers (Kubernetes) and makes extensive use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) PaaS services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Aurora.

In addition to the proven advantages typical of the Cloud technology - such as scalability, simplification of Business Continuity, redundancy, the possibility of decreasing the effort dedicated to infrastructure management - the decision to migrate to AWS Cloud was driven by the PCI certification already obtained by this provider, a market leader in the Finance sector.

"AWS Italy has supported our team in a very effective way, both in the design and in the execution of the project," declared Andrea Paolini, IT Infrastructure Manager of TAS Group, "allowing us to obtain the PCI DSS compliance certification at the beginning of November, a few months after the launch of the initiative, and in time to face the hottest period of the year for e-commerce and in-store purchases."

The new service configuration offered by TAS Group is based on AWS regional infrastructures in Dublin, Frankfurt and Milan. The overall infrastructure is also integral part of TAS Global Payment Platform, the highly modular new enterprise payment processing architecture developed by TAS to serve both incumbents and new entrants in the Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystem.

Being able to communicate in a “brand agnostic way” is proving valuable for fintechs who are scaling up their card business in the rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.

TAS Group successfully launched its MNGS proposition in the US Region back in 2020, and has now added a first client leveraging this channel also for VISA transactions.

Thanks to the established partnership with Mastercard, TAS is able to offer simplicity and reduced unitary costs to customers who are building up their volumes supporting their end-customers preferred choice of payment methods.  

TAS Group has proudly sponsored two key EU conferences in June, Payments CEE Summit and EBAday 2021, that have clearly shown how deeply the acceleration in digitalization was able to positively impact the banking DNA.

With over 1000 professionals registered at the CEE Summit, connecting primarily but not only from the Balkans, and over 2000 delegates participating to EBAday 2021, the paramount annual conference curated by the European Banking Association, all hot payment trends were deeply debated by speakers coming from all segments of the stakeholders landscape: incumbent banks, challengers, paytechs, payfacs, regtechs, regulators, corporate clients, market infrastructures, academics and market research companies.

Hottest in the agenda: Instant Payments and their convergence with card payments, Request to Pay, Buy Now Pay Later, Fraud Detection in the Real-time era, ISO 20022 migrations, API enablement, and many more core topics, including the power of the Payments as a Service paradigm as a way to accelerate the banking modernization journey.   

In case you missed our speeches at the conferences, by Dragan Spanovic, VP Sales TAS Eastern Europe, and and Mario Mendia, SVP TAS International, you may learn more about TAS Group’s 35+ years expertise as a PayFac in the evolving European Financial Services Market on our website.

Milan (Italy), 22 June 2021– Flywallet S.r.l. (“Flywallet”), the innovative startup that created a digital platform for enabling payments and services through wearable devices with biometric authentication, has signed a reserved investment agreement for the entry of Global Payment S.p.A. (“GP”), a subsidiary of TAS Group’s mother company TAS S.p.A., into the capital with a minority stake.

TAS Group is a multinational company, whose payment software solutions are adopted by commercial and central banks throughout Europe and beyond. More than 100 million payment cards are managed by TAS platforms worldwide. Thanks to its leadership, TAS Group will be a vehicle to accelerate the go-to-market for Flywallet’s mobile wallet, the world’s first for tokenizing payment cards on wearables with biometric authentication. The partnership will also result in a commercial agreement under which GP will distribute Flywallet’s wearables and service platform to TAS Group's business customers.

Flywallet’s flagship product is named Keyble, a new type of wearable that adapts to the user’s lifestyle, created with eco-friendly materials and inspired by made-in-Italy styles. It consists of a smart device that can be inserted into fashion accessories such as bracelets or watch straps and is equipped with biometric sensors for user authentication and health monitoring.

Through fingerprints or heartbeat measured via ECG, the user can enable in-store contactless payments, passwordless logins to online services, ticketing, loyalty cards, access to gyms, offices and homes, car door locks, digital identity and more. In early 2022, the wearable will be certified as a medical device capable to perform analysis of cardiac arrhythmias, blood oxygen saturation and body temperature.

Flywallet is proposing a unique “Biometric Wearable Platform as a Service” model for e-money and payment institutions, banks, insurance companies and businesses. By connecting via dedicated APIs, the Flywallet Platform allows Partner companies to deliver new types of digital services easily and securely through the proprietary wearables.

Valentino Bravi, CEO of TAS stated: “At TAS, we have always applied the principles of “continuous innovation” to ensure the market a constant technological and functional evolution of our products and services, both through significant investments in R&D - more than 10% of our revenues in the last decade - and through the acquisition of innovative companies.

In 2019, for example, the acquisition of Mantica enabled us to expand our offerings in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence areas.

Today, we are investing in Flywallet because we are convinced that offering wearable technology that is customizable and adaptable to our customers’ user experiences is a critical success factor.

We also appreciate that this project gives us the opportunity to reaffirm our decades-long commitment to promoting Italian technology in a sector that will undoubtedly improve our lives and make them more secure in the years to come.”

Lorenzo Frollini, Founder and CEO of Flywallet added: “It is an honour for Flywallet to count TAS among its shareholders and partners. Between TAS and Flywallet there is a perfect strategic fit and a total sharing of the company’s core values, including customer centricity and a relentless pursuit of service quality. In the medium term, the strategic partnership with TAS will also allow Flywallet to expand its range of services through the opportunities offered by PSD2.”

Download the press release