Agreements and cooperation
In January 2013, IFX (Interactive Financial eXchange) Forum - an international
not-for-profit industry association whose mission is to develop and promote adoption of
open, interoperable standards for financial data exchange - and EPASOrg signed a
Memorandum of Understanding where both organisations agreed to develop in common a
series of new ISO 20022 standards for ATM (Automated Teller Machine) cash withdrawals
and deposits. In October 2014, OSCar and CIR joined the EPASOrg legal structure to
create 'nexo', a new name given to an organisation whose aim is to design, develop,
promote and maintain card payment and cash withdrawal standards, protocols and
implementation specifications under a universal ISO 20022 standardisation process.
Numerous key actors of the card payment industry decided to join the new enlarged
structure so that today nexo counts among its members some key organisations such as ACI
Worldwide, First Data, Visa, AMEX, Auchan, Carrefour, Total, AccorHotels, LVMH, BNP
Paribas, UniCredit, Crédit Agricole Cards & Payments, Crédit Mutuel-CIC as
well as most
domestic card schemes in Europe.
As card tokenisation was becoming a major issue for both domestic and global card schemes
over the past few years, nexo decided to issue an ISO 20022 Business Justification (the
first steps of any ISO 20022 standardisation process) in February 2014 to initiate work
in this particular domain with the aim of reducing card payment fraud; a major concern
for banks, retailers cardholders and card schemes not only in Europe but also
worldwide.
More recently, nexo signed a cooperation agreement with IFSF (International Forecourt
Standards Forum) in the UK and Conexxus (fuel retailing and convenient stores
industries) in the US aimed at supporting, with the nexo standards, the necessary data
elements required by both the global petrol and convenient stores industries to conduct
card payments on an international basis.