Atos e-payment subsidiary Worldline and University College London partner over developing Mobile APP Ecosystem

Paris, France, 15-11-2013 — /EuropaWire/ — UCL and Worldline, Atos subsidiary in e-payment and transactional services, have agreed to work together researching and developing new digital enterprises and apps. This is the first collaboration of its kind between the university and the information technology service company.

The agreement will see Worldline in the UK utilising intellectual property that has been developed by Worldline’s Spanish division, to provide UCL with software to run an internal app store. This will enable student and graduate entrepreneurs – as well as staff and small businesses – to test their products and services prior to releasing them to the market.

The app store forms part of the ERDF-funded UCL DECIDE project intended to be the world’s largest ‘living lab’ for digital and media projects. As part of the project, UCL will utilise its staff and student body of 32,000 as a closed community for testing and evaluating digital products in pre-commercial development. It will enable both the technical and commercial testing of a product and rapid market research feedback from a diverse body of users. This is believed to be the first time that a university has taken on the codebase for a commercial product of such scope to use with students and researchers to develop their skills and, at the same time, providing the product owner with enhancements and ideas for new features.

The collaboration complements existing cooperation and engagement between the institutions, with Worldline staff at the highest levels having completed the UCL Mobile Academy pre-accelerator programme, and teams from the university having competed in the Atos Global IT Challenge for the last two years.

Commenting on the new partnership, Timothy Barnes, Director of UCL Advances – the university’s centre for entrepreneurship and business interaction – said: “This collaboration is a win-win for both UCL and Worldline. For UCL and the businesses we support it means access to software enabling large-scale product testing before release onto the market, meaning more technically refined and appealing services for the public.

“This new relationship will dramatically increase the scale of their collaboration in mobile technologies.”

Dominique Rerat, CEO at Worldline in the UK, added: “To be collaborating with UCL on an initiative of this nature is truly exciting given the significance that app stores already play in our personal lives and their undoubted evolution into the working environments. We look forwards to a fruitful and hugely beneficial working relationship together on this project.”

About Worldline
Worldline, an Atos subsidiary, is the European leader and a global player in the payments services industry. Worldline delivers new generation services, enabling its customers to offer smooth and innovative solutions to the end consumer. Key actor for B2B2C industries, with 40 years of experience, Worldline is ideally positioned to support and contribute to the success of all businesses and administrative services in a perpetually evolving market. Worldline offers a unique and flexible business model built around a global and growing portfolio, thus enabling end-to-end support. Worldline activities are organized around three axes: Merchant Services & Terminals, Mobility & e-Transactional Services, Financial Processing & Software Licensing. In 2012, Worldline’s activities within the Atos Group generated (pro forma) revenues of 1.1 billion euros. The company employs more than 7,100 people worldwide. worldline.com

About UCL (University College London)
Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world’s top universities, as reflected by our performance in a range of international tables and are currently fourth in the QS World University ranking. According to the Thomson Scientific Citation Index, UCL is the second most highly cited European university and the 15th most highly cited in the world. UCL has nearly 27,000 students from 150 countries and more than 9,000 employees, of whom one third are from outside the UK. The university is based in Bloomsbury in the heart of London, but also has two international campuses – UCL Australia and UCL Qatar. Our annual income is more than £850 million. www.ucl.ac.uk | Follow us on Twitter @uclnews | Watch our YouTube channel YouTube.com/UCLTV

For further information please contact:
Claire Bishop
claire.bishop@atos.net
+44 207 830 5274

###