Staying two steps ahead: How BPC is shaping the future of payments in Asia-Pacific

Nikhil Gujral, Head of Sales, APAC, BPC shares how the company’s “always two steps ahead” mindset has shaped its growth and innovation.

When Nikhil Gujral joined BPC’s Asia Pacific team, the company already had a reputation for anticipating change rather than reacting to it. That mindset, “always two steps ahead,” still guides every release BPC deploys and every client conversation it has across the region today. From over 20 offices the company now supports more than 500 customers, amongst those are tier-1, tier-2 banks, fintechs, SMEs, and national switches in 140 countries, and APAC is one of its fastest-growing markets.

“BPC built SmartVista on open standards and pioneered open-source development at a time when payments ran on proprietary, hardware-bound switches. Choosing openness was more than technical; it was a declaration that technology should simplify how people pay and how banks innovate,” commented Nikhil Gujral, Head of Sales, APAC, BPC.

Those roots crystallised into three rules BPC follows to this day: Modularity. Everything runs as micro-services that switch on or off as business needs; Deploy anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, data centres, or a bank’s basement. SmartVista runs where economics or regulation dictate; and Continuous innovation. Fast, continuous releases, and continual innovation and upgrade of its platform. Independent analysts such as Quadrant, Forrester, Celent, and others keep naming BPC as leaders for exactly that reason. For the same reasons, BPC is recognised in prestigious awards.

From card switch to cloud platform

BPC’s SmartVista grew and evolved from targeting card issuing, but today it offers all kinds of digital and payment possibilities and even allows to establish and run whole digital payment ecosystem. Each decade brought a leap. From e-commerce and EMV support built directly into issuing, acquiring, and card management in the 2000s to mobile banking, e-wallets, real-time fraud management, loyalty, and dispute management in mid-2010s to offering platform in SaaS model, SoftPOS, e-government solutions, BNPL, and full Platform-as-a-Service model by 2020s.

Today, the SmartVista suite provides a range of integrated banking and payment services, ranging from offers to traditional banking: acquiring, issuing, switching, POS driving, e-commerce payment gateways, real-time payments, and open banking, digital banking and payments propositions such as mobile and internet banking, e-wallets, agent banking, SME banking, digital lending, SoftPOS, and BNPL; Fraud & risk management solution: AI-driven fraud detection, customer profiling, risk management, and ACS and ecosystem enablement through e-government services, e-business ecosystems, smart city solutions and API sandboxing.

“Our SmartVista Digital Platform is BPC’s next-generation solution suite, built for any project scale to help banks, fintechs, and SMEs modernise and innovate the way they deliver banking and payment services. Institutions benefit from a centralised dashboards, advanced analytics, and role-based access, whilst customers reap the benefits of an intuitive, user-friendly experience across mobile apps, web portals, and merchant touchpoints,” commented Nikhil Gujral, BPC.

Long before “digital transformation” made it to hot trends, APAC banks were wrestling with legacy mainframes and rising customer expectations. Because SmartVista was already cloud-ready, BPC could localise quickly, cut capital expenditures and let institutions pay only for what they turned on. For example, one of BPC’s regional wins, CPB in Malaysia, enhanced its security of digital channels with SmartVista Fraud Management in the cloud with ML-driven capabilities and a 360-degree data overview, whilst one of its long-standing customers ACLEDA has modernised all of its infrastructure, migrating to SmartVista and achieving an impressive 40% increase in issued cards base just in a few years. And there are other examples.

BPC has grown into 100+ clients in APAC, amongst which are Tier-1, Tier-2 banks, fintechs, national switches in roughly 70% of APAC markets, supported from hubs in Hanoi, Singapore, Phnom Penh, Manila, and Jakarta.

Outcomes speak louder than numbers. For example: In Cambodia, SmartVista now processes about half of the country’s retail transactions, setting new benchmarks for reliability and speed. In Vietnam, more than ten tier-1 and tier-2 banks enable digital payments with modern payment methods on the platform. In Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, and Pacific Islands, BPC established its presence through many successful cases of various scale,s ranging from the largest financial institutions to national switches to fintechs and telcos.

In terms of regional transportation and mobility projects, BPC’s automated fare collection stack O-CITY powers multimodal ticketing in several Southeast-Asian countries, proving that payment innovation travels well beyond banking.

Recently, they’ve been named “Luminary” (excels in solution capabilities; generally, has a leading market presence), the highest recognition by Celent analysts, for their proposition in Retail and Small Business Digital Banking Platforms in APAC.

Designed to help banks, fintechs, and SMEs modernise and innovate fast, the SmartVista digital platform brings consumer banking, digital wallets, SME, and merchant services together on a single cloud-ready stack. It covers everything from digital onboarding and biometric security to AI-powered chatbots, split-bill payments, virtual cards, and QR acceptance, delivering hundreds of configurable features — including personal finance management, loyalty, cash-flow prediction, agent banking, and merchant payments — without sacrificing performance or security.

“What sets BPC apart from the competition in Asia Pacific is the end-to-end infrastructure that links front-end interfaces with robust back-office operations. Through modules such as wallet and account management, fee configuration, settlements, and product design, the platform delivers both scale and agility to our customers,” commented Nikhil Gujral.

BPC’s digital offerings enable connected payment ecosystems. SmartVista is a micro-services, cloud-native platform that bridges the merchant front-office and the bank back-office core, delivering both essential and value-added services to each participant. It helps institutions create interconnected payment networks that unite banks, merchants, transit and citizens; build multi-purpose marketplaces where consumers and businesses meet and pay; and power e-government portals for taxes and VAT, fines, and social benefits. Everything is delivered through open APIs and an ISO 20022-ready integration layer — on-premise or in the cloud — for future-proof, scalable collaboration.

Cloud first, ecosystem always

BPC’s regional agenda rests on three pillars. Cloud-led delivery, meaning that every module is available as SaaS or PaaS. Then its ecosystem enablement with issuing, acquiring, wallets, merchant services, account-to-account rails, mobility ticketing, and even e-government disbursements connect through one powerful integration layer of SmartVista. And disruption-free migration. Big-bang or phased, BPC has over fifty successful migration projects from legacy competitor solutions of ACI, FIS, HPS, Openway, CardPro, Electra, Euronet, and others to show that it can modernise the infrastructure without disruption to the business operations.

What is next?

Across APAC, hyper-personalisation has become table stakes: over two-thirds of Asia-Pacific consumers are willing to share personal data for a tailored online experience and almost everyone says they stay loyal to brands that personalise. With the region home to around one-fifth of the world’s digital banks, challengers are setting the bar with event-driven, context-aware offers that raise expectations for incumbents. Researches also flag a continued acceleration of hyper-personalisation in APAC as gen-AI scales, making it critical for traditional banks to adopt these in everyday payments and digital services to stay competitive in front of fast-moving challengers.

To meet the trends, BPC is developing its roadmap toward hyperpersonalised card-as-a-service ecosystems, enabling institutions and non-financial brands to launch on-demand, context-aware card products in hours, not months, and plug them straight into lifestyle journeys. At the core is a next-generation platform with an AI-driven product creation engine that automatically tailors features, limits, loyalty, and even visual design to micro-segments from behavioural and transactional signals and dynamic card identity features that allow shifting between debit, credit, BNPL, or prepaid modes based on spend patterns or events (e.g., travel, subscription renewals), multi-currency wallets, on-card tokenisation, and seamless FX for blockchain and future CBDC rails.

What does hyperpersonalisation unlock in practice for financial institutions? For example, a travel booking app could instantly issue a multi-currency virtual card at checkout, pre-loaded with loyalty points, travel insurance, lounge access, and real-time FX alerts—without the customer ever touching a traditional bank interface. That’s the standard BPC is building for: secure, compliant, ISO 20022-native that makes personalisation scalable across APAC.

The BPC’s ISO 20022 framework is live and CBPR+ re-validated ahead of the November 2025 SWIFT deadline. BPC is advancing CBDC-related developments, whilst its AI Lab is embedding machine-learning into digital solutions, personalised offers, and smart-routing tools APAC institutions will use to serve the next billion digital consumers.