The
proposed merger of payments services giants Voca
and Link has been approved by the Office of Fair Trading,
despite their dominant positions in the UK market.
Voca processes some 90% of UK salaries while Link is an
international leader in ATM services and real-time
transactions.
Although the companies plan to keep core platforms separate they
are already jointly developing an infrastructure for their Faster
Payments initiative, which will support the requirements of the
Single Euro Payments Area.
The combined group, known as VocaLink, will process an estimated
eight million transactions this year. It is highly dependent on IT
due to its requirement to cut transaction times. Analysts expect
the payment clearing systems to be made to work together through
enterprise service bus technology.
Link and Voca to merge to tackle European
payments market >>
VocaLink is right not to merge core IT
>>
Voca chooses Distra to support payments services
>>
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