Insights

Milan — July 26, 2022 — TAS S.p.A. (hereinafter “TAS”), a leading company in Italy in the supply of software and services for banking and financial applications, also present in Europe and America, has today finalized the acquisition of the entire share capital of ASTRO IT S.r.l. (hereinafter “ASTRO IT”), a company specialized in the application management and system integration of software solutions for banking, insurance and large corporates. The relevant experience and know-how held by ASTRO IT in the field of application management, regulatory compliance and process optimization represent a qualitative as well as quantitative enrichment of the production capacity of TAS. “Acquisitions are an important element of the strategic growth plan of TAS, as well as for the strengthening of the skills and for the staffing of teams for the launch of new digital transformation projects and solutions, - comments Fabio Bravi, Head of M&A, special projects and corporate developments of TAS, and digitalization is among the primary objectives of TAS’s target customers.” “Integrating ASTRO IT into the TAS family means consolidating the work done together in recent years. - comments Valentino Bravi, CEO - I take this opportunity to welcome the shareholders and all employees and collaborators of this reality, beginning a new development path together with us”. “After a few years of close collaboration, joining TAS Group makes us proud and gives us a great stimulus to jointly face the new challenges and growing opportunities that market offers” - declares Giuseppe Muzzioli, General Manager of ASTRO IT. The acquisition adds another piece to the consultancy and delivery capabilities of TAS Group in the field of payment services and capital markets. Download the press release

Milan, June 23^rd 2022 - Given the unstoppable increase in cybersecurity risks, no organization can avoid constantly investing in the security of its systems to protect itself and its customers. Hence, it is increasingly important for software developers to have products and services that analyse and test the robustness of applications against fraud attacks. This is even more true for companies like TAS, whose core business is linked to the development of mission critical solutions for customers in the Finance world, a sector where security is a top priority, considering the potential implications of vulnerability on the stability of the entire payments ecosystem. In fact, Tas is one of the few Fintech providers admitted to the Italian CERTFin community, which brings together banks and technology suppliers relevant to the Payment Systems, in order to increase the IT risk management capacity of financial operators and the cyber resilience of the Italian financial system as a whole. To further improve the security of its applications, TAS has recently signed an agreement for the entire Group with Synopsys, a global company headquartered in the United States, which has worked in recent years on the expansion of their suite of Application Security Testing tools with a great response from the market, proving the high quality of their solutions. “According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of cyber-attacks will come from known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could have been fixed earlier. At TAS, due to the nature of our business, we are even more attentive than others to these issues and we like to “play ahead” whenever possible. For this reason, we have decided to adopt the complete suite of Synopsys solutions. Synopsys is the undisputed world leader in all areas concerning the secure development of the code, so we are convinced that we have made the right choice for us, but above all, to be able to offer a really important added value to all our customers” – comments Fabrizio Brintazzoli, Cybersecurity Officer of TAS. “Synopsys specializes in Application Security. Always alongside our Partners, we offer advanced BSIMM (Building Software In Maturity Model) tools and methodologies in the development of secure code. Synopsys invests every year in R&D and acquisitions in order to expand the product portfolio by guaranteeing complete SDLC solutions. We are honoured by the agreement signed with TAS which will offer its customers software developed with a safe methodological approach” - adds Emanuele Burali d'Arezzo, Regional Sales Manager at Synopsys Software Integrity Group. The adoption of Synopsys solutions by TAS Software Factory has already begun in Italy and it will be extended in the coming months to the other European TAS Group branches. Download the press release

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.

Piteco strengthens its role as an international banking connectivity hub through the collaboration with TAS and consolidates its footprint as an effective tool to support business growth.

Thanks to Piteco’s treasury solutions and TAS's Service Bureau, accessing to the most important banking interconnection channel becomes plug and play for the benefit of large corporates and SMEs

The integration with TAS allows Piteco to offer SWIFT connectivity in the cloud with significant savings in costs and implementation time

Milan, 16 March 2022 - Agreement signed between Piteco (PITE: IM), an Italian software house delivering corporate treasury and financial planning management solutions, and TAS (TAS: EXM), specialized in software solutions for e-money, payments and financial services. This strategic collaboration starts with the aim of supporting the international growth strategies of corporates by simplifying their access to the SWIFT network - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication - the main network used by banks for fast and secure cross-border payments. Thanks to the cloud integration of TAS's Swift Service Bureau with Piteco software, a single platform is unlocked, capable of providing seamless SaaS access to SWIFTnet. The use of the cloud guarantees a rapid activation of the service - which becomes plug and play - generating savings for businesses in terms of economic investment and time required to go live, while ensuring all the security that the cloud can guarantee today. User profiling, access control, Segregation of Duty, Audit Log, Privacy, authentication methods and Active Directory / LDAP are just some of the aspects and functions that Piteco manages with the utmost attention during the implementation of its SaaS solutions. The simplicity and efficiency of the newly embedded SWIFT access enables faster adoption by smaller companies with a strong vocation for international markets, who need to manage finance in a centralized and automated way. In Italy there are many SMEs expressing excellence and entrepreneurial ability, who look beyond domestic borders, making a decisive contribution to Italian exports. Through its comprehensive banking connectivity hub, Piteco normalizes and processes various international messaging protocols used by corporate treasuries to initiate payments or receive bank statements. Piteco’s hub integrates the corporates authorization workflows and allows payments to be made nationally or internationally in a safe, efficient and highly automated way, with the convenience and advantage for business managers of being able to approve them anywhere via web or mobile apps. “The strategic nature of the SWIFT network is now quite evident. We are talking about a universal, secure interchange infrastructure, with more than 11 thousand different member companies in over 200 countries, exchanging over 42 million messages daily. An impressive number, that has been growing also thanks to the digitization imposed by the pandemic”- commented Paolo Virenti, CEO of Piteco. "The partnership with TAS gives us the opportunity to integrate our software with even more ease with all the banking counterparties in the world, - continues Virenti - through the creation of a single platform we are able to simplify our customer management, and complete definitively our identity as an international banking connectivity hub and, above all, an effective tool to support the growth of companies. A role that sees us daily committed to developing solutions and agreements that can, as in this case, lead to functionalities that make it possible to lighten the work of the CFOs of large companies, and increasingly also of small and medium ones, helping them to better manage the governance of cash flows and thus freeing up precious time to define strategies ". Valentino Bravi, CEO of TAS, adds: "By creating an integrated operating model with an Italian excellence such as Piteco, TAS confirms its role of enabler of payment services for corporates and their integration with the financial industry. This collaboration model confirms the great potential, that in my opinion is still partially unexpressed, available for Italian excellences in the digitalization sector to grasp both in the domestic and international market." Partnering with TAS once again underlines the ability of Piteco, constantly committed to the integration of innovative solutions, to support CFOs of national and international corporates in their daily activities. The most advanced treasury solutions available on the market and delivered in the cloud combined with banking connectivity in fact allow CFOs to manage treasury flows even more effectively. Thanks to the automation of data collection and analysis, CFOs will enjoy a single centralized view of corporate data around the world, updated in real time. The collaboration between Piteco and TAS Group is not limited to the SWIFT theme, it will also extend to the field of Open Banking and Open Finance with the aim of fully exploiting all the opportunities offered by the European PSD2 regulation. Download the Press Release

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