Altron Managed Solutions enters into strategic partnership with EFTLab, bringing cutting-edge payment solutions to Africa

Altron Managed Solutions, a subsidiary of JSE listed Altron, has entered into a partnership with EFTLab. The partnership will provide cutting-edge payment solutions and capabilities to customers in South Africa and the rest of Africa.

“EFTLab are market leaders in the global payments industry with their payments platform and other solutions being deployed at an increased rate worldwide. We are excited to be involved in their growth on the African continent, while at the same time offering our clients cutting-edge and cost-effective alternatives to the solutions currently in use at financial institutions as well as retailers across Africa. Our partnership will ensure that we enable our clients to future-proof and accelerate their businesses and ensure growth across our continent,” says Liam Mc Dermott, Pre-sales Manager, Altron Managed Solutions.

This partnership will also provide customers with access to a more flexible omni-channel switch deployed in the cloud and virtual or physical environments. This switching and payment capability can be deployed rapidly within months, resulting in reduced overhead costs to the client, both capital and operational.

The current switch (or system operator) vendors still rely on somewhat outdated technologies, with reliance on mainstream operating systems, databases, or even historically outdated platforms. These all require scarce and highly skilled personnel to develop, maintain and operate, and not to mention, relatively ‘old-fashioned’ licensing fees or models.

Keith Milligan, Chief Commercial Officer of EFTLab,had the following to say: “In a world where legacy platform architecture hinders innovation and flexibility, EFTLab brings a wealth of experience designing and delivering unique and progressive payment platforms to serve clients throughout Africa. We are proud to align and partner with a company whose core values are similar to ours, so we can bring these offerings to Altron’s customers.”

EFTLab offers a variety of breakthrough payments (BP) solutions, including its certified PA DSS payment switching platform BP-Node, deployed in any environment, whether physical or virtual. The above bundled with EFTLAB’s payment testing suite BP-Sim and flexible middleware options mean clients can quickly deploy a scalable processing platform, which is customisable to meet each business’s needs. These aspects reduce professional services costs and align with Altron Managed Solutions' costing and service delivery models, based on giving the customer value for money.

Newer solutions are grounded in leveraging widely used skills and open source technologies and are also designed to be ‘slim’ and efficient in terms of processing requirements. Many have software-licensing models that are innovative, flexible and aggressive – thus addressing the problem areas found in the older systems, such as strict vendor-dependence, term, or per-transaction per-device fees.

By partnering with EFTLab, Altron Managed Solutions will be able to grow its current solution offering and long-term strategy of increasing its African and global footprint, giving the ability to develop our next-generation technology.