Banksys

» see banksys.be as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Belgium spent two decades paying for things through a company most Belgians could not have described. Banksys owned the switch. It authorized and guaranteed every Bancontact and Mister Cash transaction, and it put the terminals on the counters. Its logo was printed on the little beige boxes in bakeries and petrol stations, a strange sort of fame. You saw the name constantly and you never once thought about the company.

The company is older than its name. The Belgian register has the company starting on 26 June 1978, and its oldest filings carry the name Bancontact, the cooperative the banks used to run one of the country's two rival card networks. The other was Mister Cash. Running two incompatible networks in a country of ten million was obviously stupid, and in 1989 the banks fixed it by merging the networks under one operator. The new name was published in the annexes of the Belgian Official Gazette on 7 November 1989. The cards kept both brands for decades afterward, so the name Belgians learned was Bancontact.

What Banksys built was unglamorous and extremely effective. Belgium went cashless early by European standards, with debit at the counter normal years before that was true elsewhere, and it happened because one company controlled the terminals and the network and could simply decide how it would work. That was also the complaint. The Belgian competition authority kept finding Banksys too dominant in payment services, and small-business groups were still saying nothing had been fixed in 2003.

~ the case file ~

~ the purse ~

Proton was the company's big idea and its clearest failure. Launched in 1995, it was a chip card that held actual money, originally capped at 5,000 Belgian francs and later at 125 euros, meant for the small payments where cards were too slow, a parking meter or a pay phone. There was no PIN and no call to a central system. The card approved the transaction itself, offline, in about a second.

It worked technically and never caught on commercially. Most people did not understand what loading a card with money meant, and losing the card meant losing the money, exactly like cash. The technology traveled better than the product did: the Dutch Chipknip ran on it, and in August 1998 Banksys spun the Proton assets out into a separate company, Proton World International. Visa and American Express took stakes in it, as did the Australian group ERG. ERG bought out its partners in 2001 and sold the lot to STMicroelectronics two years later at a reported fifty million dollar loss. Belgium switched the purse off for good on 31 December 2014.

~ the sale ~

SEPA is what ended the arrangement. Once European payment rules were going to be harmonized, a national scheme owned by national banks was a liability rather than a moat, and the owners decided to sell rather than fund the transition themselves. The agreement was signed on Wednesday 19 July 2006: Atos Origin would take Banksys and the Bank Card Company from Dexia, Fortis, ING and KBC, for an amount nobody disclosed. The two companies together had turned over 309 million euros in 2005 and employed 1,100 people. Part of the stated logic was moving Bancontact and Mister Cash onto Maestro as a first step.

~ the day the name went ~

The end is on two pages of a scanned notarial act, filed by Vincent Vroninks of Ixelles and published in the Gazette annexes on 17 August 2007. On 1 June 2007 the sole shareholder of Banksys NV resolved to absorb the Bank Card Company by merger, dissolving it without liquidation so that it ceased to exist from that date, and then, in point three of the same act, to change the company's own name to Atos Worldline.

Turkey has the same kind of company, the interbank card center that sits behind the cards without ever being on them, and I have never thought about that one either. The company at Haachtsesteenweg 1442 in Brussels is still there and still processing: same enterprise number, 0418.547.872, trading as Worldline since 22 October 2014. Two of the four banks that sold it were themselves taken apart in the crisis that followed.

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