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Message from the
President & CEO

2020 – A YEAR WE WILL NEVER FORGET

As with all members of the Canadian and global communities, 2020 was an unprecedented year for Everlink, our clients and partners. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals, families, communities, and businesses worldwide cannot be understated. As a member of the Canadian financial services community, Everlink witnessed the impacts the pandemic had on Canadian credit unions, banks, financial institutions, as well as merchants and retail businesses. As a processor of electronic payments and financial transactions, Everlink observed declines in ATM, Point of Sale (POS) and Mobile Payments transaction volumes beginning in March and persisting throughout the year amid ongoing government restrictions, lock-downs and other protective measures.

The circumstances surrounding COVID-19 challenged us in numerous ways with significant, far-reaching impacts on our day-to-day lives, including our work routines and norms. Our number-one priority from the beginning was the safety, health and welfare of our employees, clients and partners. Everlink implemented a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) at the pandemic’s onset to protect its staff and operations. Everlink has and continues to maintain a detailed BCP designed to provide for (among other things) remote access and teleworking operations. As part of Everlink’s overall BCP, Everlink has defined and implemented protocols and practices associated with securing remote enablement to allow the organization to operate in a “business-as-usual” approach through secure distributed systems, remote capabilities, clear communication protocols, and validation of discovery and recovery processes. If one thing is true in light of the pandemic situation, adaptability is probably the most consequential differentiator between those individuals and organizations that thrive versus survive. For Everlink, it presented a “call to action,” demanding we adapt – and adapt quickly.

In the end, productivity did not suffer, our communications, morale, and engagement held strong, with evidence of improvement in many areas. Despite these challenges faced by Everlink, our clients and partners, and the financial pull-backs directly and solely attributable to pandemic conditions and associated government, regulators and health authority responses, Everlink had a remarkably successful year.

Corporate Recognition

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2020 KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIs) and HIGHLIGHTS:

  • We processed over 1.5 Billion transactions in 2020, representing 13% year-over-year growth, despite pandemic-related pull-back.
  • We now serve approximately 97% of Canadian credit unions, as well as 55% of client-facing Schedule 1 and 2 Canadian banks and 100% of all Interac® mobile debit transactions – a well-established and growing market share.
  • We continue to expand and extend our Mobile Payments portfolio in lockstep with its steady growth in 2020 at almost 50% year-over-year, which is on top of the 85% year-over-year growth achieved in 2019.
  • We launched Everlink eHUB™, which is Everlink’s digital payments integration platform designed to connect channels and innovation through APIs and file feeds.
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  • Everlink signed a multi-year extension of its Mobile Tokenization Service Provider agreement (TSP) with Interac Corp. Since 2015, Everlink has extended and expanded its strategic partnership with Interac® while playing a critical role as a member of the Interac® TSP consortium.
  • We have positioned our POS Acquiring portfolio in our SME Line of Business, focusing on Host-to-Host (H2H) and Unattended/Self-Serve as the defacto Interac® gateway for large-scale, global POS Acquirers. It’s beginning to take off and live up to our expectations, with volumes forecast to ramp dramatically as all of our international acquirer clients continue to solidify their Canadian businesses and begin to serve major merchants. We are very confident about further growth through additional partnerships in this space over the coming months/years.
  • Card Issuance Success! Everlink now serves 100% of Everlink credit union clients and the majority of our bank clients – including, most notably, the introduction of our co-badged debit Mastercard solution in partnership with Servus Credit Union and co-badged Visa debit solution in partnership with ICICI Bank. Later in 2021, Everlink will be introducing its cutting-edge Card Management System (CMS), which will support end-to-end lifecycle management for debit, prepaid and virtual cards.
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  • We are providing eDETECT™ real-time Fraud Management to 98-99% of our credit union client base and a growing number of our bank clients. Building on this very solid base, we continue to expand and extend our Fraud Management solutions in 2021, including extensive enhancements to our award-winning Lock’N’Block® and introduction of our award-winning eSCORE™ solution, as well as eDETECT+™ providing best-in-market enterprise Fraud Management capabilities to address the ever-evolving needs of our clients as they introduce a growing range of multi-channel and e-commerce/card-not-present offerings.
  • We achieved numerous successes in ATM Managed Services (AMS). Building on our comprehensive ATM Express™ Solution, supporting both NCR and Diebold, we introduced Diebold’s Next-Gen DN Series ATM and implemented support for Interac Contactless ATM issue transactions. We also introduced our enhanced ATM Monitoring and Management system to improve functionality and client service and support capabilities.
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  • Furthermore, we undertook several enhancements to our Payment Processing Platform, including creating and certifying a new POS processing node and batch environment in our Winnipeg data centre. In 2021, we are planning a large-scale enhancement and modernization of our settlement and reporting systems, which will not only provide for multi-faceted improvements to the overall client experience but will support more significant data analysis and reporting functionality.

In summary, in 2020, we effectively managed our operations considering all circumstances and continued to deliver to our annual operating deliverables through sound and effective operational and strategic execution. Above and beyond all of the accomplishments described above, we are equally proud of the continued growth and development of the spirit and character that is Everlink!

2020 Key Performance Indicators (Kpis) And Highlights:

2021 looks to be another stellar year in our inexorable journey as Canada’s preeminent payments solutions company, as we continue to make substantial, persistent and sustained progress. We expect to remain resilient despite any persisting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to protect and grow our business.

For 2021 and beyond, the Everlink team continues to focus our Innovation Solutions Roadmap on both internal productivity and efficiency improvements as well as external client-facing digital transformation solutions. We will continue to implement and roll out the next phase in Everlink’s corporate evolution: Everlink 6.0, as first introduced in the fall of 2019. Everlink 6.0 emphasizes our strategies and plans to prepare for, and participate and excel in the evolution of payments focusing on Payments Modernization, Real-Time Rails and Digital Payments. Everlink 6.0 is intended to establish the foundation of Everlink’s participation in the emerging Digital Payments reality providing real value by building on our Five Strategic Priorities:

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1. Mobile Payments solutions, with emphasis on in-app and in-browser transactions.

2. POS Acquiring Host-to-Host (H2H) and Unattended solutions with a focus on enabling our large-scale, international POS acquirers.

3. Co-badged Debit Card solutions with an emphasis on launching Mastercard and Visa Affiliate Programs in-market.

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4. We are solidifying and deepening our “Partners in Payments” relationship with our clients, earning their trust and confidence as their go-to payments solutions partner.

5. eHUB™, an API-based platform strategically aligned to meet the payments landscape’s needs and challenges for the coming decade. The essence of our eHUB™ platform is to deliberately exploit the operational leverage achieved by volume-related economies of scale while simultaneously adapting our operational processes and evolving and strengthening our payments processing platform to excel in the modern, real-time, open, API-centric, ISO 20022, payments world.

  • eCONNECT™ – Everlinks settlement and reporting platform powered by BHMI Concourse software. This new platform will provide transformative improvements from what we have today. It will comprise different modules that offer significant benefits in terms of modernized core settlement reporting functions, automated reconciliation process, improved client experience in terms of speed to data access and new business intelligence capabilities, and last but not least automated disputes chargebacks handling.
  • We are exploring introducing a Prepaid Cards Program, issuing prepaid debit cards by leveraging capabilities we now have since introducing our new Card Management System (CMS).
  • eREWARDS™ – Everlinks debit loyalty rewards program that benefits both consumers, credit unions and financial institutions.
  • Building out on top of the successful launch of our eHUB™ platform earlier in 2020, we plan to extend its capabilities further to include international remittance programs, both bulk and consumer e-Transfer enablement, and a number of new fintech/paytech partnerships.
  • In addition, there are new Host-to-Host certifications and enhancements, Contactless ATM transactions enablement including both card and mobile-initiated transactions.

2021 will be another busy year filled with innovation, growth and payment solutions, and delivery leadership. My sincere thanks to all of you for your support, hard work, dedication, commitment, perseverance and partnership. Everlink will continue to work very hard to provide all of our clients the best in service and innovative payment solutions to help continue growth for many years to come.

Take care, and all the very best.

Mark Ripplinger
President & CEO
Everlink Payment Services Inc.