The changing landscape of Payment Switches for the 21st century

We are sponsoring the ATMIA South Africa Banking and Payments Industry Summit in Johannesburg on August 23rd. My colleague Jim Tomaney and I will be in attendance and Jim, our chief operating officer, will be discussing ‘Modernising payments processing with next-generation switching platforms’ as one of the keynote presentations.

Why South Africa?

We at Renovite Technologies see South Africa as an area poised to embrace innovation in the ATM channel. Globally, the cash vs. digital payments debate rumbles on. For South Africa, while cash does remain king to an extent, the country has seen double-digit growth in electronic fund transfer (EFT) and card payments since 2010.

Given recent policy initiatives to improve financial inclusion and therefore social mobility by breaking down barriers like access to banking, the extent to which the country could be transformed through better, more innovative technology in the ATM space is considerable. Put simply, South Africa is ready for ATMs that offer more financial services than just cash withdrawals.

South Africa is in the midst of emerging from a technical recession driven by new consumer payment preferences, globalisation, a pan-African payment ecosystem requirement and the convergence of Fintechs. It is innovative start-ups and products like Reno-Switch that will deliver this transformation, not large FI’s with payment platforms entrenched in ageing legacy technology.

Finding the next level payment switch

Sitting at this heart of better payments platforms sits the transaction switch; the core which facilitates acquiring, routing, switching, authenticating and authorising transactions across multiple channels. Many current ATM deployers are constrained by outdated switches; they are unable to support innovation and as a result, their capacity to offer better functionality is constrained.

Adopting cloud-native payment switches is central to driving change. They allow for innovation while seamlessly coexisting with traditional channels to mitigate the potential for any disruption. Our cloud-native solution Reno-Switch is the first transaction switch specifically designed to meet the demands of evolving payments environments like 21st-Century South Africa.

The modern payment world demands an equally modern payment hub, as opposed to veneers and shells around archaic technologies. With a life cycle based on Continuous Delivery or DevOps principles, Reno-Switch bypasses the problems inherent in designs build in the early 2000s based on 1990 design patterns and is designed to embrace changes rather than side-step them.