Press release

July 14, 2005

Banking Production Centre (BPC) has announced today the elevation of its IBM relationship status to Advanced Business Partner in IBM’s PartnerWorld Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISV). This program is designed to deliver valuable benefits to IBM Business Partners worldwide and to help them create opportunities to grow business and drive increased profit.

Commitment to business relationship with IBM has always been a key to BPC’s success on the international market. In 2000 ВPC became the first company in Russia to be awarded the title of IBM e-Business Partner by IBM Moscow Office. Later on IBM EE/A named BPC as the best partner of the year 2000 recognized for its enterprise e-business solutions based on IBM platform. In 2001 the international status of IBM Business Partner Certified for e-Business followed.

BPC’s membership level in IBM’s PartnerWorld Program was elevated based on the successful track record of the companies’ bilateral cooperation aimed at IBM hardware-based processing and e-business infrastructure deployment. The IBM Advanced Business Partner designation will allow BPC to leverage IBM’s experience in hardware and software to provide its existing and prospect customers with the better quality and functional wealth of EFT solutions.

BPC’s integrated solutions for retail banking are based on the SmartVista suite of software products – a single platform for transaction processing, card management and e-commerce. SmartVista won IBM’s recognition and was awarded with IBM ServerProven and IBM Total StorageProven titles giving customers the confidence that SmartVista solutions install quickly and run reliably on IBM servers and conform to IBM TotalStorage products interoperability requirements.

Currently BPC is actively deploying SmartVista on IBM eServer p-Series hardware platform in Russia, CIS and Asia Pacific. SmartVista tests on IBM’s new server line – IBM eServer iSeries were successfully completed in June 2005 that has marked a new step towards broadening a range of hardware platforms SmartVista runs on and has opened up new exciting opportunities for marketing IBM iSeries-based processing solutions.

Another business area that BPC is actively pursuing is e-business and e-commerce solutions designed using IBM WebShere application development tools. One of the most challenging projects of this sort was the implementation of Internet payment processing system for Alfa-bank in 2000. Runet Business System (RBS) is a payment gateway to Alfa-bank’s processing centre allowing the bank to render secure Internet-acquiring services to merchants.