Reducing risk and complexity

The success of South Africa’s banking system is based on the principle of interoperability between banks to facilitate payment transactions, thereby achieving significant cost savings and reducing risk and complexity in the industry.

Interoperability

The economic benefits of interoperability are considerable:

• It provides the financial sector with the confidence that the banking system is properly regulated and complies with international banking best practice and standards
• Introduces uniform levels of security and processing for cross-border payments
• Significant cost benefits due to the acceleration in the flow of funds, enabling the Central Bank to monitor liquidity levels and payment streams
• Equips banks for the challenge of banking the unbanked, bringing additional customers into the formal banking environment

Cost effective

BankservAfrica provides countries with the option of reducing initial infrastructure set-up costs by electing to transact remotely via South Africa. Once interoperability can be sustained, a standalone infrastructure will be implemented, facilitated by BankservAfrica.

Range of products

BankservAfrica’s products are ideally suited to the African continent, for example the integrated cash management system (ICMS) was developed to address the need for a better cash management system on a continent where the overwhelming majority of transactions (as much as 90% in South Africa alone) are still cash based.

BankservAfrica product offering includes:

• Card switching, real-time, interbank credit card authorisations
• Interbank card switching and clearing and settlement services including ATM, debit card and credit card switching
• Electronic funds transfer (EFT) enabling banks and their sponsored users to process financial transactions electronically
• Cheque code line (CLC) clearing provides an automated debit clearing system for cheques, including cheque imaging, archiving and exchange
• Real-time clearing (RTC) for person-to-person payments
• RiskNet, a card fraud management service for debit and credit cards
• CNP secure is a secure card not present authentication for internet banking and shopping
• Mzansi NBA (South African national bank account project) for the unbanked
• EDO authenticated and non-authenticated early debit order service related to micro lending
• Mzansi Money transfer (MMT) allows people without bank accounts, in different areas, to transfer cash to one another
• Research and development which allows us to constantly offer new switching solutions
• Consultancy
• Management information service (MIS) provides information in respect of transactions cleared by BankservAfrica on behalf of participating banks