Regulations are changing the way South African banks handle payments
South Africa’s Nedbank has chosen Volante Technologies to help it revamp its payments message service using VolPay Foundation, which focuses on validating and processing payments. The move comes ahead of regulatory change next year, which will force all South African institutions to change the way they handle payments.
Under the new rules, all South African banks will have to cease offering non-authenticated early debit orders by September 2016 and instead offer a new debit order instrument, called Authenticated Collections. The rule-change is part of a general drive towards greater transparency; the new AC debit order instrument uses a combination of the ISO 20022 and ISO 8583 message standards to authenticate, process and report on the lifecycle of each transaction.
As part of the reform, each of these transactions will require the definition and maintenance of customer mandates as well as the generation of collection requests and their validation against these mandates. Together, these changes prompted Nedbank to overhaul its payments capabilities and accelerate its support for new clearing standards and digital payment services.
VolPay was launched in April and aims to speed projects and reduce over-run. It is based on the ISO 20022 messaging standard. Local South African company Bytes Universal Systems will help Nedbank to implement the Volante platform.
“A key part of this new infrastructure is our Gateway architecture, which addresses the integration needs of all of our customer channels, clearing networks, and internal systems with our core payment processing service,” said Glenn Smith, divisional executive of mobile, e-commerce and payments technology at Nedbank.
VolPay Foundation is designed to accelerate many of the required development processes through automatic code and documentation generation and inbuilt testing. The platform also includes validation and conversion logic, predefined functions, mapping tools and pre-built transformations. About 330 maintained local, regional and global message standards and transformations are included along with automated deployment into multiple environments.
A period of testing is scheduled to commence in March 2016.
According to Mick Fennell, general manager, Middle East & Africa, at Volante, using VolPay Foundation, Nedbank’s own resources can now rapidly create the necessary message transformation and validation between the bank’s external channels and its core payment processes. In addition, Volante supports deployment into both real-time and off-line processing environments, as mandated by the new AC standard.
“The payments world is constantly changing, particularly in the South African market,” said Fennell. “Not only do banks now have to adapt their systems to comply with the new ISO 20022 standards, but they must also integrate these changes with new digital payment channels and changing customer demands.”
