BankID BankAxept taps TCS to enhance Norway’s payment system

By Gloria Methri

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has entered a partnership with BankID BankAxept AS to set up and manage an operations command center that will enhance the resilience, security, and availability of Norway’s financial infrastructure.

BankAxept is the national payment system in Norway, with 80% of card payments made using a BankAxept card. BankID is the Norwegian eID verification solution, with more than 90% of the country’s population, banks, public institutions, and commercial enterprises dependent on it. New regulations around digital identity authentication require BankID to offer users a compliant, reliable, and secure electronic identity solution and round-the-clock support.

BankID BankAxept AS chose TCS to create a new command center, for its experience in leading large-scale growth and transformation projects for enterprise clients in the banking and financial services sector. As part of the agreement, TCS will build and manage a 24×7 operations command center in Oslo, for all BankID BankAxept AS users and clients. The new command center will enable immediate responses to any service disruption, security issues, or client requests that are related to Norway’s national payments and electronic identity verification systems.

TCS will operate a dedicated monitoring framework at the new command center that can predict, react, and prevent any issue in the value chain from impacting the wider financial services ecosystem. The framework will feature a mechanism that shares communications data with a team of experts and vendors so they can quickly identify the root cause of the problem and collaborate to resolve any issues.

Øyvind Westby Brekke, CEO of BankID BankAxept AS, said, “BankID is currently used by 4.4 million users across Norway, and BankAxept handles approximately 8 out of 10 in-store payments. Any downtime of these systems will have a severe impact on the country’s public institutions, businesses, and citizens. We turned to TCS as a trusted technology partner to build a mission-critical command center that will quickly help us resolve any technical issues or disruption to services, and this will ensure the resilience and reliability of Norway’s vital financial services infrastructure.”

Hemakiran Gupta, Head of Banking, Financial Services & Insurance – Continental Europe, TCS said, “We are pleased to partner with BankID BankAxept AS in their mission to enable seamless financial transactions across the nationwide ecosystem and to foster innovation. This latest partnership in Scandinavia adds to the long list of nationally significant market infrastructure institutions across the world who view TCS as a preferred partner in their growth and transformation initiatives.”