and Bank of Ireland extended its agreement with us for consumer and commercial processing, as well. TSYS also signed an agreement with Permanent TSB, a Dublin-based retail banking company, marking our first European debit client. 

We strengthened our presence in the Nordic region by signing a large Nordic bank as a PRIME licensing client. Also in the region, we completed the integration of DnB NOR Kort, Norway’s largest financial services group, for its MasterCard brand on our PRIME licensing platform. 

Our PRIME licensing business continues to grow at a positive rate. In Africa, we signed Imperial Bank of 

2010 stands out as a year spent building a foundation that will support scale in new countries, on new systems and in growing payment channels such as health- care, prepaid and mobile. 

Kenya on PRIME and upgraded Qatar Islamic Bank to PRIME as well. In the Commonwealth of Independent States region, we signed Standard Bank of Azerbaijan. These moves demonstrate our commitment to building our licensing business. 

We gained considerable traction in Germany, and began the year by announcing an agreement with Frankfurt-based Degussa Bank to provide payment services to its corporate and business clients. We also signed B+S Card Service, one of Europe’s leading acquirers with a presence and scale in 12 European countries, to provide it with back- office merchant acceptance services across Europe. In response to our impressive growth in Germany, we expanded our relationship management team on the ground to make these clients’ transitions as seamless as possible. Each of these deals, in its own right, is noteworthy and reinforces our ongoing commitment to Europe. 

We continued a keen focus on Italy, the seventh-largest card market in 

Europe, and announced the signing of Cedacri, a provider of outsourced payment services. 

We are extremely proud of the performance of CUP Data, our joint venture with China UnionPay, which now has more than 90 percent of the medium-tier outsourced processing market. CUP Data continues to solidify its reputation as a leading provider of outsourced credit payments while expanding into the segments of debit and prepaid, as well. 

In Japan, a leading Internet bank, SBI Sumishin Net Bank (SSNB), selected TSYS to process its start- up payment card portfolio. We will provide processing and back-office operation services for SSNB to issue cards to consumers, including retail membership cards, a proprietary private-label credit card and network-branded credit cards. 

In Brazil, we successfully completed the second phase of a three-part conversion for Carrefour onto TS Prime,$^{SM}$ a new server-based, processing system that will enable 

