Leading UK supermarket chain to migrate EFT to Mosaic's Postilion

Mosaic Software, the global transaction processing software provider, is to supply leading UK supermarket chain Somerfield with its core electronic funds transfer (EFT) platform Postilion to centralise the retailer's payment processing as part of its Chip and PIN migration programme.

Somerfield will use Mosaic's Postilion to deliver Chip and PIN transaction switching functionality across the 1275 Somerfield and Kwik Save stores in the UK. A 50-store pilot programme will commence in May 2004, and Postilion will serve all stores by November 2004.

Postilion will handle all electronic transactions made at Somerfield and Kwik Save's estate of IBM 4690 tills and Ingenico PIN pads and route them to the retailer's card acquirers. Postilion will run on Stratus fault-tolerant servers that provide better than 99.999% uptime, ensuring maximum availability of the retailer's payment processing services.

As a core element of Somerfield's Chip and PIN migration and EMV compliance programme, Postilion was chosen following a year-long market evaluation of a number of EFT switch solutions.

According to Darrell Maton, Head of Store Systems for Somerfield: "We felt that Postilion offered us the best balance of EMV-compliant functionality against cost, of all the solutions we evaluated. It also has the flexibility to support multiple card acquirers as well as the processing of other types of card, such as fuel cards, which will be a key part of our future plans to expand our small store and convenience store presence."

Somerfield plc's annual sales across both Somerfield and Kwik Save stores are around 5 billion, of which approximately 45% or 22.5 billion is made using EFT. Together, Somerfield and Kwik Save stores have a 6.3% share of the total UK groceries market.