Subscribe

BankservAfrica hits electronic payments milestone

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2022
Martin Grunewald, chief business officer at BankservAfrica.
Martin Grunewald, chief business officer at BankservAfrica.

Automated clearing house BankservAfrica has reached a milestone on electronic payments, processing over 100 million EFT credit payments in October.

Africa’s largest automated clearing house, which builds and operates South Africa’s core interbank payments infrastructure, announced yesterday it reached a new electronic payments record across multiple streams. These include EFT credits, debit cards and real-time clearing service payments.

BankservAfrica’s role in the South African National Payments System (NPS) is to facilitate interoperability between the banks and ensure regulatory compliance.

It says it processed 103 million debit card transactions, surpassing the 100 million monthly transactions mark, while the real-time clearing service exceeded the 20 million transaction mark for the first time.

“The total of 101 million transactions – six million more than in September – represents a major milestone in the history of BankservAfrica processing of interbank EFT credit payments,” says Martin Grunewald, chief business officer at BankservAfrica.

“These electronic payments have ensured a secure and seamless payments experience for many consumers and businesses, demonstrating BankservAfrica’s capabilities and experience for an always-on payments service that is responsive to the growing demand of electronic payments in South Africa.”

Grunewald notes the organisation continues to play a crucial role in enabling simplicity and interoperability, processing billions of trusted interbank payment transactions, valued in trillions of rands, per year, while maintaining the safety and security of the NPS.

Meanwhile, BankservAfrica and the Payments Association of South Africa are set to introduce faster payments through the introduction of the Rapid Payments Programme (RPP), which is expected to be introduced in 2023.

The RPP, to be launched under the brand PayShap, is an industry-led initiative by the two organisations.

“When rolled out, the RPP will offer a cost-effective instant payment service across banks, a proxy service to embed user banking details, a request to pay service as well as support for several known retail payment use cases,” the Reserve Bank of SA said in a statement.

Share