Ingenico Payment Services

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Ingenico Payment Services GmbH

logo
legal form GmbH
founding 1992
Seat Ratingen , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management Niklaus Santschi, Frank Hartmann, Björn Hoffmeyer, Roland Schaar, Carl Frederic Zitscher
Number of employees 583
sales 109.2 million euros
Branch Financial services
Website www.ingenico.de/payment-services
As of December 3, 2019

The Ingenico Payment Services GmbH ( IPS ; formerly easycash GmbH ) is a provider of cashless payment solutions headquartered in Ratingen . The company with five European locations offers retailers in particular services related to card-based payments. IPS is a subsidiary of Ingenico Payone Holding GmbH, which belongs to the French Ingenico Group SA , a global provider of payment transaction solutions based in Paris .

As an e-money institute in accordance with Section 1 (2) sentence 1 no. 1 of the Payment Services Supervision Act (ZAG), the company is authorized by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority to provide e-money services . Ingenico Payment Services looks after around 110,000 merchants with around 258,000 card terminals in Germany, Austria and Benelux and processed over 1.7 billion payment transactions in 2018.

history

Historical logo

Easycash was founded as a department of Mannesmann Datenverarbeitung GmbH in 1992 , because the Mannesmann Group wanted to open up new business areas. In 1997 it was registered as a GmbH. In the same year, Easycash became a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Bank AG , from which Easycash took over the db-POS business in 2000. In 2002, the company for payment systems (GZS) took over Easycash as a subsidiary.

GZS was taken over in 2006 by TeleCash, a subsidiary of First Data , under the condition of the cartel office to sell Easycash; Easycash and TeleCash together would have had a market share of over 50%. Accordingly, Easycash was sold to Warburg Pincus in 2006. In September 2009 Easycash was taken over by Ingenico . According to its own information, the company has 110,000 customers with 258,000 terminals (as of 2018). The payment transactions processed in Germany amounted to over 1.7 billion transactions in 2018.

Easycash Loyalty Solutions GmbH was the German market leader for card-based customer loyalty and gift voucher solutions, which are increasingly equipped with payment and credit card functions. The sister company of Easycash GmbH operates a large number of different programs across Europe and processed 55 million payment and bonus transactions in 2012. The Hamburg company's 75 employees look after more than 26 million customer accounts.

With the resolution of the shareholders' meeting on May 14, 2014 and an announcement on May 27, 2014 in the commercial register, easycash GmbH changed its name to Ingenico Payment Services GmbH . Peter Meussen, Markus Weber, Frank Hartmann and Cristoph Dühr were appointed as new managing directors at the beginning of 2014. Dühr is leaving the company in autumn 2016.

On May 30, 2018, the Ingenico Group announced negotiations on a joint venture with BS Payone. Shortly afterwards, on July 25, 2018, the Ingenico Group and Deutsche Sparkassenverlag successfully agreed on a joint venture between their subsidiaries Ingenico Payment Services GmbH and BS Payone GmbH.

On January 7, 2019, BS Payone GmbH was incorporated into Ingenico Payone Holding GmbH and thus became a sister company of Ingenico Payment Services GmbH. In the next step, the merger of Ingenico Payment Services and BS Payone was completed with the entry in the commercial register in June 2019. Since then, the company has been trading under the name PAYONE and is working on a new and uniform brand identity.

criticism

Inadmissible storage of personal data

In September 2010, the German payment network operators came under fire from data protectionists. The companies were accused of having saved the sales data of almost all German EC card holders and of having obtained information about their solvency from this data. These are used to choose the payment method (delayed with direct debit or in real time with PIN; the card-issuing bank only guarantees redemption with the more expensive PIN procedure). It is not necessary to make a special customer contract, as the decision is made by the Easycash bank end processing system and Easycash usually takes on risk management (debt collection, correspondence, etc.). Data protection experts interpreted the creation of such large data collections as an inadmissible storage of personal data. In addition to Easycash itself, the data will also be used by some contractors. Rewe distanced itself from further use by the end of September . In a press release, Easycash stated: “Easycash has never sold payment or bank details to third parties. Consideration was given to using the risk index in addition to card payments, but due to data protection concerns this was not pursued further. "

NDR report on the sale of movement profiles

In October 2010, the subsidiary Easycash Loyalty Solutions was criticized in a radio report in NDR Info for having resold records from EC card holders. Among the at least ten evaluations that are available for sale, there would also be movement profiles of the EC card holder. Furthermore, according to the NDR, evaluations of the “customer quality” and the “utilization rate” of the EC card customers could have been acquired. According to information from NDR Info, the company has access to the bank details and, among other things, the name, address, occupation and date of birth of the cardholder.

Christoph Pfeifer, managing director of Easycash, rejected the allegations.

The state data protection officer of Hamburg, Johannes Caspar , initiated an immediate investigation, but gave the all-clear the next day: The review by his authority showed that such considerations had been made in the past, but not by the Hamburg subsidiary Easycash Loyalty Solutions implemented. There are no concrete indications of violations of the law.

Nevertheless, the data protection authority of North Rhine-Westphalia filed a criminal complaint against Easycash the following day. Data was actually transmitted, but only for statistical purposes in pseudonymised form. This is basically permissible, but the data protection authority expressed doubts that the encryption method used was sufficiently secure. As a result, the North Rhine-Westphalian state data protection officer, Ulrich Lepper, imposed a fine of 60,000 euros on the company on September 12, 2011 because, according to the data protection officers , it had illegally passed on around 400,000 data records on accounts and payments to a sister company. Easycash accepted the fine, but attached great importance to the fact that it could not legally identify any violation that would justify a fine. On September 14, 2011, the company's plans to sell the creditworthiness data collected in the course of its own activities from up to 50 million EC cardholders to insurance, telecommunications and debt collection companies became public.

In April 2011, IPS GmbH was awarded the Certificate of Approved Data Protection by TÜV Rheinland . After two successful monitoring, a new certification was successfully carried out in April 2014 in accordance with the certification requirements of TÜV Rheinland.

Double debits

Due to incorrect transmission of the payment file by Ingenico's EC card terminals, on May 6, 2016, purchases paid by Girocard or EC card were debited twice from the customer's bank accounts in all branches of the Aldi Süd discounter . According to press reports, customers of Sparkassen, Postbank, Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank were affected.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annual financial statements for the 2014 financial year of Ingenico Payment Services GmbH. In: Bundesanzeiger , February 10, 2016, accessed from the company register on October 29, 2016.
  2. ↑ bundeskartellamt.de press release
  3. ↑ Electronic Federal Gazette, May 27, 2014, changes
  4. ↑ Christoph Dühr - part of the Arsago Ventures team. In: a-acm.de. arsago ACM GmbH, 2016, accessed on January 17, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Ingenico Group enters into exclusive negotiations with Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe to combine BS PAYONE with Ingenico Retail assets in DACH. Retrieved March 11, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Press release: Closing of the combination of BS PAYONE and Ingenico Retail assets in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In: ingenico.de. January 8, 2019, accessed March 11, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Peter Hornung and Jürgen Webermann: Der Datenkrake von Ratingen ( Memento from September 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) NDR.de from September 23, 2010, accessed on September 23, 2010
  8. ↑ 50 million EC card data passed on . In: Welt Online , September 23, 2010, accessed on September 23, 2010.
  9. ^ A b Konrad Lischka: EC card company denies snooping allegation . In: Spiegel online from October 14, 2010, accessed on October 14, 2010
  10. ^ A b Peter Hornung and Jürgen Webermann: The Big Brother of Hamburg-Lokstedt ( Memento from October 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). NDR.de from October 13, 2010, accessed on October 14, 2010
  11. ↑ Hamburg data protection agency gives the all-clear in the Easycash case. AFP, October 14, 2010, accessed October 18, 2010 .
  12. ↑ Easycash - NRW data protection agency files criminal charges. In: Focus Online. October 15, 2010, accessed October 18, 2010 .
  13. ↑ EC network operator easycash has to pay a fine . NDR.de, accessed September 14, 2011.
  14. ↑ Checkout with customer data . ( Memento from March 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) NDR.de, accessed September 14, 2011.
  15. ↑ Breakdown with EC cards: Aldi Süd debits too many customers. In: FAZ.NET . May 9, 2016, Retrieved May 9, 2016 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 20 ′ 14 "  N , 6 ° 50 ′ 57"  E