Digital payments leader, Network International, reaffirms its commitment to South Africa with ZAR500 million investment in deploying its processing capabilities locally; building on its ZAR3.5 billion acquisition in Payfast.
Network International has said that its state-of-the-art cloud-based, integrated payment suite for merchants, banks, FinTechs and mobile network operators (MNOs) will be hosted and operated in South Africa from June 2023. The new digital payments platform is highly configurable and customisable. It currently processes over four million transactions per day and over US$60 billion of digital transactions a year.
“Network International’s digital payments technology is already deployed and trusted by over 200 banks, FinTechs and MNOs across the Middle East and Africa. What we are doing now is bringing Southern Africa its very own on-soil cloud hosted version. Having technology customised to meet the growing demand from a broad segment of South African customers and plugging directly into BankServ, Visa and Mastercard locally has been warmly welcomed by existing Southern African clients and has already secured significant interest from potential clients in the retail, banking, FinTech and telco space. The strategic decision to invest significantly in on-soil processing capability is in support of the ever-growing need for localisation and the directives of the Reserve Bank of South Africa,” said Chris Wood, Regional Managing Director, Southern Africa at Network International.
In 2021, the South African Reserve Bank published a requirement that all transaction data in the payments ecosystem should be processed and stored, within the borders of South Africa. Network International supports this decision and has reaffirmed its commitment to serving South Africa by deploying its capabilities in South Africa.
“With our state-of-the-art digital payments technology built, hosted and maintained locally we will accelerate building new products that are relevant for South Africa. More importantly, our clients’ customisation needs will get immediate attention. This gives us the edge over our competitors, most of whom have yet to, or may not, make the same commitment,” said Wood.
The Network digital payments platform has at its core a global leading card management system (CMS) for issuing clients to manage and host card credentials, and Network’s ‘Ngenius’ acquirer processing capability for a broad range of merchant services, whether e-commerce or in stores. The API-rich interfaces are designed for speed and flexibility, allowing clients to quickly and easily integrate into its core capabilities and bolt on third party partners across a range of services. The platform will be hosted in South Africa on Amazon’s new installation of its Africa AWS.
“We see the Network South Africa platform investment as an important strategic step forward in becoming a truly local provider. Our clients can look forward to continued innovation as the Network South Africa platform continues to evolve. Already able to process more than 3,000 transactions per second, it is a resilient, secure and agile platform to help banks, FinTechs, telcos and retailers provide market-leading products and experiences in a low risk and compliant technology environment,” said Wood.