News

Euronet signs cross-border acquiring deal, moves toward SEPA compliance

March 4, 2007

LEAWOOD, Kan. - Euronet Worldwide Inc. announced the signing of its first Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)-compliant cross-border transaction processing solution in Central and Eastern Europe. The contract was signed with OMV Refining & Marketing GmbH, a subsidiary of OMV Aktiengesellschaft. OMV is an oil and gas group in Central Europe. It is Austria's largest listed industrial company.

SEPA is a standard set to allow companies and other economic players to make and receive payments in euro, whether between or within national boundaries.

According to a news release, the multiyear deal between Euronet and OMV is expected to facilitate the migration of OMV's decentralized acquiring operations at filling stations, including several third-party service providers in 12 countries to Euronet's SEPA-compliant processing platform for approximately 5,000 POS terminals as well as POS management and fuel-card authorization services.

Euronet expects to leverage its in-country European operations to provide 24/7 operations-support, including local language customer support to OMV across the 12 Central and Eastern European countries. The agreement allows for additional countries, where OMV operates, to be migrated to the centralized SEPA processing platform in the future, Euronet says.

By the end of 2008, all of OMV's 5,000 payment terminals should be changed to EMV-compliant terminals, which will be connected to Euronet's central IT data center to offer bank-card and fuel-card processing services. With this transaction, OMV will be one of the first large cross-border merchants to implement the evolving SEPA concept.

Within the agreement, Erste Bank, a leading retail bank in Central and Eastern Europe, has been chosen as the cross-border merchant acquirer for Bankcard payments at OMV forecourts across these 12 countries.