FITB Fifth Third Bancorp

CINCINNATI and LONG BEACH, N.Y., March 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Fifth Third Processing Solutions, a premier full service payment solutions provider today announced that its Pay in Your Currency service, powered by Planet Payment, Inc. (LSE: AIM: PPT and PPTR; OTCQX: PLPM), a leading multi-currency and data processor, is being offered to the ATM terminal and processing clients of Fifth Third Processing Solutions.  This new service, also known in the industry as Dynamic Currency Conversion, allows international cardholders using eligible cards to see the final amount of a cash withdrawal in their home currency at the time of the transaction.

Without Pay in Your Currency, if an international cardholder withdraws U.S. Dollars from an ATM, the transaction is subsequently converted to their home currency by their bank or card issuer.  Given the timing of the conversion, the cardholder is not able to determine the final withdrawal amount until they receive their account statement from their financial institution.  The service announced today provides greater clarity and convenience to the cardholder by providing them the option to convert the transaction at the time of the withdrawal.  If the cardholder chooses to have the transaction converted, the amount in their local currency that they see on the ATM screen is the exact amount that will appear on their financial institution's account statement.  

"We believe that the Pay in Your Currency service is an important addition to our suite of ATM product solutions," said Royal Cole, President, Financial Institution Services at Fifth Third Processing Solutions.  "Our valued financial institutions partners rely on Fifth Third Processing Solutions for leading edge and innovative products that can help them drive additional revenue, as well as provide important value-add features for their ATM programs.  Pay in Your Currency is another example of our ongoing commitment to provide solutions to our processing clients that help deliver greater profitability and an overall better customer experience for their valued customers."

Fifth Third Processing Solutions and Planet Payment have been offering a Dynamic Currency Conversion service to retailers in the U.S. market since 2004.  Through this expanded relationship, the Service will be available on the 11,000 ATMs which Fifth Third Processing Solution manages on behalf of their current customer base of almost 2,000 financial institutions across the United States.  The targeted launch date of the Service is early in the third quarter of 2011.

"We are excited to launch our new ATM product with Fifth Processing Solutions, one of the leading providers of ATM product and processing solutions in the United States," said Philip Beck, Chairman and CEO of Planet Payment.  "Fifth Third Processing Solutions and Planet Payment have been successfully offering multi-currency processing solutions to their merchant partners since 2004 and it is a natural extension for Fifth Third Processing Solutions to now offer this same convenience throughout their EFT processing partners."

About Planet Payment

Planet Payment's Common shares trade in the UK on AIM under the symbols PPT for unrestricted Common shares and PPTR for Reg S Common shares and in the United States on the OTCQX under the symbol PLPM.

Planet Payment is a leading international payment and data processor, providing banks and their merchants with innovative solutions to accept, process and reconcile payments, anytime, anywhere and in any currency. Our customer base of more than 45 acquiring banks and processors stretches from North America, to the Middle East, to Asia Pacific, including China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia and India.

Planet Payment is headquartered in New York and has offices in Atlanta, Beijing, Bermuda, Delaware, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. Visit www.planetpayment.com for more information on the Company and its services. For up-to-date information follow Planet Payment on Twitter at @PlanetPayment or join Planet Payment's page on Facebook.

Fifth Third Processing Solutions, LLC delivers innovative payment transaction processing and acceptance solutions to create and support complex payment strategies for merchants, businesses, and financial institutions around the world. A pioneer in card payment acceptance in the early 1970s, Fifth Third Processing Solutions is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is a joint venture with Advent International and Fifth Third Bank, a subsidiary of Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB).

As a premier full service payment solutions provider, the Company provides servicing solutions and product engineering for financial institutions’ and retailers’ credit card, debit card, merchant and private label programs, processing over 11.4 billion ATM and point of sale transactions and over $378 billion in debit and credit card sales volume annually. Its subsidiary, NPC, is the largest provider of payment processing services exclusively focused on the small-to-medium merchant processing market.  The Company supports over 408,000 merchant and financial institution locations and 11,000 ATMs in 44 states and 8 countries. According to the Nilson Report (March 2011), the Company is the third largest U.S. merchant transaction acquirer. Learn more at www.FTPSLLC.com.

SOURCE Fifth Third Processing Solutions