Nothing special about e-anything, says BoE

By Bronwen Kausch, Media strategist, Innovative Media Productions

Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2001

BoE Bank will fold its e-commerce and e-business divisions into its Merchant Service infrastructure, saying the divisions now form part of daily business and will operate more profitably as such.

BoE says e-commerce and e-business are now so much a part of everyday business life that it is no longer appropriate for the division to be an isolated specialist area.

The bank`s e-commerce division will cease to exist in isolation, and both the e-commerce and e-business divisions will become part of the bank`s mainstream operations.

The Merchant Services Division of BoE Bank will now be equipped to manage the full range of business requirements of the e-business divisions. This will include physical point of sale devices, software for mail order/telephone order, as well as its e-commerce service i-PayOnline, launched last year.

The new structure includes the formation of a new digital commerce department, which management says has been developed as a result of merging e-commerce, m-commerce and chip technology.

Eugene de Villiers, GM of BoE Bank`s e-Business division, says the move can be viewed more as an administrative one, based on a decision to bring e-business operations in line with BoE Bank`s regular trading.

"The e-business division, including the point of sale services, account for around 18% of BoE Bank`s bottom line. The move will mean that we won`t have to have dedicated networking assigned to the e-commerce division, and as part of the existing issuing and acquiring infrastructure, the business unit will be in a position to perform more profitably."

De Villiers says the move will be seamless for the group`s e-business clients and says BoE`s consumer financial services initiative icanonline, run by M-Web and BoE subsidiary NBS, will not be affected by the move.

He says the group will focus on expanding further into corporate payment cards, as this is where BoE believes profits lie, and future research and development will be dedicated to keeping pace with all new payment technology.

De Villiers says while the group will not actively grow its current e-commerce offerings, there will not be further cutbacks over and above the four retrenchments necessitated by the restructure.