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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39265470,00.htm

Electronic ticketing on the cards for Atos Origin?
Services company looks to payments and ticketing to boost growth

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Tuesday 29 July 2008

Atos Origin is looking for future growth through its UK card payments and ticketing businesses.

silicon.com Financial Services

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The company's UK arm reported sales of £376m in the first half of 2008, a year-on-year increase of 12 per cent. Profit margin also increased by six per cent, compared to the same period last year.

Atos UK CEO Keith Wilman told silicon.com the performance was due to a transformation programme to focus a few key verticals, including government homeland security and environment; rail and road transport; health business process outsourcing; fast-moving-consumer-goods enterprise outsourcing; and mutual financial services pensions and insurance systems.

He said: "One of our largest areas of operations is payments in the transport vertical. We process £5bn per year in rail tickets payments. The natural extension is to sell tickets. We will be looking at incubating our payment and loyalty card transactions business, through organic growth and through acquisition. We are only taking £10m per year in revenues through our loyalty and payments cards operations, but it is a high-growth area."

Wilman said the company was interested in the deployment of near-field-communication technology in the field of payments and ticketing.

He said: "One of the next aims is to see what we can do with Oyster card [style] ticketing on the rail network. Given where we are with rail transport, the expectation is to move tickets onto cards."