In support of efficient business, merchants make use of point of sale (POS) devices to acquire transactions for their customers irrespective of which bank they utilise. Once a transaction is created it is transmitted to the merchant’s bank which in turn passes the transaction to SASWITCH to route it onto the issuing (customer’s) bank for authorising.

All transactions with a valid local currency BIN number are switched between acquiring and issuing financial institutions. Debit card transactions bearing an international BIN number are not switched via BankservAfrica. These are cards belonging to customers whose banks are not in South Africa.

Once a transaction is received from an acquiring financial institution, BankservAfrica applies PIN security algorithms, secures the transaction on both the BankservAfrica primary and disaster recovery (DR) processors, and then forwards the transaction to the issuing financial institution. This is followed by the standard authorised / not-authorised response to the acquiring financial institution.

Features and advantages

• Securing the transaction:
  
  All parties have confidence in the successful completion of the transaction. Consumers are content in using electronic means to transact.
  
   

• No cash required to transact:
  
  Reduction of cash transactions reduces the cost of doing business. Reduces cash floats at merchants and therefore reduces risk of attack.