Total System Services Inc. has started an online initiative whose goals include giving customers a single way to access its multiple offerings.
The Columbus, Ga., transaction processor offers a wide variety of products and services to financial companies, some developed in-house and others picked up through acquisitions, and they do not all work together as well as the company would like.
The n-gen initiative, announced Monday, is aimed at addressing that issue by simplifying the way people can use TSYS offerings.
The first element of the initiative, expected to be available in the fourth quarter, will be a Web portal that lets users log in once to gain access to all of TSYS' products and services.
Customers of different TSYS services, such as issuing and loyalty, currently must use different interfaces to access each one, and M. Troy Woods, TSYS' president and chief operating officer, said that working with these interfaces can sometimes feel like working with completely different companies.
The problem "has been self-inflicted" in part by "bringing on different entities like loyalty and prepaid, or buying and building half of our merchant business," Mr. Woods said in an interview Monday.
The initiative will demonstrate that TSYS is "not running the company in silos," but instead "with a common theme and a set of values," he said.
The initiative will not replace any of the underlying products and service TSYS offers, but it will make the ones that are already available easier to use, Mr. Woods said. "Absolutely no one in this space can bring it together like we're going to bring it together."
The Web interface will be offered as a free upgrade to all customers.
Also in the fourth quarter, TSYS plans to introduce a data analytics tool that would pool information on a variety of processing tasks from all participating customers, so individual clients could see how they stack up against their competitors. The comparison service would be offered on a subscription basis.
"We'll be able to aggregate data across TSYS business lines," said Kenneth Tye, TSYS' senior executive vice president and chief information officer.
"We want to take a couple of things and really turn them upside down as to how you go about your business."
The common interface also will help TSYS introduce products and services that will work easily with current ones, Mr. Tye said, notably enabling customers to offer various types of mobile phone alerts to consumers. "The mobile phone will be a key vehicle that our end consumers will begin to use more and more," he said.
"One of our key goals in n-gen is to make it easier for our customers … to carry on their business," he said, and "to provide one place for our customers to go and navigate all within TSYS."
Nick Holland, a senior analyst at Aite Group LLC of Boston, said that TSYS clients are likely to appreciate the upgrade.
"To have a single dashboard or a single point of interface for the people who are doing the management, it saves a great degree of time and effort."
As things stand today, "you have very little integration from a user perspective," Mr. Holland said. "You have potentially several screens that have a single purpose."
Many of the interfaces used to access TSYS products and services are old and outdated, he said, and offering a unified one would give the company a big advantage when promoting its capabilities.
"They're obviously moving in the right direction," Mr. Holland said.
