The signed agreement boards the PowerCARD solution, chosen by CEDICAM in August 2010.

The contract was signed, the 26th of May, by Bernard Noël, General Manager of CEDICAM, and Mohamed Horani, CEO of HPS Group. "This project has in view a complete overhaul of all merchant and automatic back-office activities of Groupe Crédit Agricole, operated by CEDICAM, the group's payment platform subsidiary. CEDICAM will thus benefit from one of the most effective acquiring platforms of all leading European banks", explained Mohamed Horani.

PowerCARD solution, ranked 'Positive' by Gartner* for three consecutive years, meets in every respect the needs of CEDICAM which, in 2010, processed close to 1.5 billion card authorizations, representing 31% of the market share in France.

As part of this project, HPS conducted a benchmark on its PowerCARD solution at IBM Centers in Montpelier, France. Results attainted established the ability of PowerCARD to handle 350,000 merchants with 3,000 simultaneous users, an online peak of 250 transactions per second, batch processing of 6,000,000 transactions per hour and 6 months' activity log, otherwise 1.2 billion transactions.

Further to the benchmark, workshops were organized with CEDICAM to specify their business needs and jointly define the best solutions to meet those business needs. HPS is currently in the process of customization and integration of the solution and is proceeding to the migration of all CEDICAM's activities on the PowerCARD solution.

*Gartner: American leader in the field of IT research

About HPS

HPS is leading payment Solutions Company. More than 100 sites use HPS's PowerCARD© solution supporting the processing needs of over 320 institutions (banks, financial institutions, telecom operators, postal organisations, government entities, etc.) in over 70 countries around the world including Japan, Malaysia, Canada, France, Brazil, etc.

HPS has been listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange since 2006 and now has over 300 employees based in Casablanca, Dubai, Paris, Aix-en-Provence and Miami.

About CEDICAM

CEDICAM is the payment processing subsidiary of Crédit Agricole S.A. and 'Caisses Régionales'. CEDICAM operates primarily in electronic payments, payments processing and payment security. CEDICAM is a leader in Europe with more than 7.5 billion transactions processed each year.

For more information about Crédit Agricole S.A. and Cedicam: www.credit-agricole.com.