It has been an exciting year for payments and payments technology. Our Payments Product Manager, Rinske van der Bijl, has discussed the latest highlights and additions to Electrum's Clearing House Payments offerings.
Dear Electrum Payments Community
It’s impossible to start this letter without mentioning our excitement about PayShap RTP (request-to-pay), that is fast becoming a reality in South Africa. Just like most of you, the last few months at Electrum have been a busy journey of getting ready for this big industry milestone. New APIs needed to be learned (and designed), and use cases and transaction flows had to be understood (including the transitioning of a ‘request-to-pay’ between its various potential states). Message processing protocols for RTP transactions were planned, designed, and developed, and eventually, our new RTP engine became ready for implementation.
(At Electrum, we had the added excitement of building capability for BankservAfrica’s RPP Testing Platform for allowing banks to test their RTP implementations against the simulator. Through this particular part of our journey, we continue to have the benefit of engaging closely with industry participants and enjoying the RTP anticipation and excitement.)
So this letter comes to you with an important message: Electrum is ready.
We’re ready for RTP, and we can’t wait for this addition to the PayShap rail to become a reality for South Africans in October this year. We can’t wait to see what banks, corporates, and fintechs are going to do with this capability, and we are certain that a host of creative use cases are soon going to be available to consumers.
Electrum’s mid-year product update includes more than the launch of our RTP solution, which is currently in testing with the BankservAfrica RPP Testing Platform. We are also officially releasing our fully functional and industry-tested solution for EFT. We believe that while more modern rails such as RTC and PayShap are providing more options to businesses and consumers, there is and will for a long time still be an important place for EFT in the payments landscape.
We also believe that banking systems should be able to participate in EFT using modern technology such as ISO 20022 and cloud-based processing.
Moreover, we feel that a bank should not need to worry about the intricacies of batch processing with the operator, such as maintaining the opening and closing of processing windows, complex validations of file-based processing, etc. Additionally, we feel that a bank should have access to a recon solution with the functionality to reconcile the various types of EFT scenarios to ensure full transaction integrity even in complex edge cases. So we have built our EFT solution to take care of all of that on behalf of our clients.
So as you can see, we have a lot to be excited about, and we are massively grateful for the opportunities that we’ve had to build the software for our mid-year update. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out. We are always eager to share experiences and learnings with you, and we are especially keen on workshopping solutions for supporting further upcoming scheme additions (...PayShap QR….?).
As always, thank you for being a part of our journey.
Yours in Modernised Payments,
Rinske and the Electrum Team