Easycash Loyalty Solutions GmbH, an Ingenico SA company, has taken over the payment processing for French prepaid card issuer LaSer, strengthening a partnership that began a year ago, terminal maker Ingenico announced Nov. 21.
Hamburg, Germany-based Easycash will process LaSer’s international prepaid cards accepted at all retailers and proprietary cards used by retailers in customer loyalty programs, Ingenico stated in a press release.
LaSer, a customer relationship management company equally owned by the Galeries Lafayette Group and BNP Paribas Personal Finance, has managed more than 20 million prepaid cards and has issued 11.7 billion euros in loans, according to the company website.
The cooperation between Easycash and LaSer began a year ago with Easycash making its payment-processing technology available to LaSer, which remains responsible for administrating customer relationships and card issuing, the press release stated.
Easycash data centers will process all LaSer customer international transactions under the agreement, Ingenico stated.
“For us, it was essential that the systems not only have a closed-loop functionality but also, and above all, are suitable for open-loop cards,” Yves Leborgne, LaSer information technology manager, stated in the release. “This enables us to develop further marketable [services], which are increasingly in demand among our customers.”
LaSer serves international companies such as BP Worldwide PLC, Portugal retailer Modelo Continente SGPS, AS Watson & Co. Ltd., Woolworths SA, ICI Paris XL and Galeries Lafayette.
The Easycash partnership with LaSer benefits both companies because any processing that can be done at a lower cost helps a card issuer, industry analyst Gil Luria of Los Angeles-based Wedbush Securities, tells PaymentsSource.
“Processing is a scale business, and if you can offer a fully functioning processing center–and Easycash represents a big processing engine for Ingenico–you can process a lot of transactions at a lower cost than those trying to process on their own,” Luria says.
The arrangement is similar to Green Dot Corp., a large prepaid card provider in the U.S., using TYSY (Total System Services Inc.) for its processing, Luria suggests.
“You may be a big prepaid card issuer but may not have enough scale to process on your own,” he says.
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