Digital marketplaces are common at South Africa’s largest retailers and banks, with most businesses offering a comprehensive suite of services. When delving into how leading businesses have set up winning value-added service (VAS) portfolios, three success factors stand out. These areas contribute to the efficient running and reliability of the business, as well as ensuring the best possible commercials.
Transaction initiation, processing, and clearing; followed by automated end-of-day processing; combined with real-time observability are key parts of any successful VAS business, especially when the right systems are in place to optimise these focus areas. The impact is most powerful when these areas are looked at holistically, rather than in functionality siloes. Each of these aspects can play a crucial role in improving a business’s VAS portfolio and contributing to the profitability of its services.
Let’s unpack how these factors have played a role in optimising South Africa’s leading VAS businesses, and explore how they have helped to build market leaders in the industry.
For a VAS portfolio to be successful at banks or retailers, there needs to be a solution in place that can be trusted at scale for real-time transaction initiation, processing, and clearing.
When it comes to transaction processing, functionality such as preferential routing has played a big role in successful VAS businesses. It allows them to support many different service providers while ensuring that transactions are delivered to the provider that offers the best commercial returns. This, combined with automatic failover, ensures a reliable VAS offering. It also contributes to a superior customer purchasing experience since customers are always able to have their VAS purchases fulfilled by the business, even when one of the providers is offline.
A multi-scheme API is an essential part of any leading VAS platform, making it easy for businesses to expand and add new services. The result is that the business only needs to maintain a single POS integration for each service type - reducing the need for expensive POS development. Open-source APIs allow service providers to build an interface themselves using the same standard, thereby reducing CapEx costs for new services on the side of the bank or retailer.
Automated end-of-day processing goes hand-in-hand with efficient processing and clearing of transactions. Ultimately, the right system contributes to the freeing up of resources due to automated processes. Market leaders also have visibility across all transaction outcomes so that any issues can be resolved efficiently.
Straight-through processing plays an important role in ensuring that transactions are moved seamlessly from clearing to settlement, with automated processes enabling this. Significantly, the need for tedious and error-prone manual labour is removed.
Leading VAS businesses have integrated back-office functionality that offers more with:
Transaction-level reconciliation that takes place in an automated way allows these processes to happen at scale, a vital consideration for enterprise businesses dealing with high-volume transactions.
Powerful reconciliation functionality means manual intervention is only required when it comes to the investigation of problematic transactions. Within these businesses, resources are open to focus on core business and growth rather than the systems needed to support it.
High-functioning VAS businesses need a real-time view of the health of services. They need to be able to address problems where issues are identified; gain insight into the volume of transactions; and allow teams to review the details of all transactions.
Tools are carefully chosen to deliver improved, real-time operational visibility - providing both business insights as well as technical insights. Technical operation teams benefit from the ability to:
For business operations, the value of observability comes when, for example, commission revenue is down one month and investigation into this problem is made easy. This helps the team quickly determine if the problem was with billing or because of real-time operational failures.
The right alerting and monitoring mechanisms need to be in place for any business to function at a high level, with detailed dashboards that enable teams to troubleshoot and problem-solve easily and swiftly.
Businesses that are winning at VAS in South Africa offer reliability, flexibility, and superior customer experience. This is all achieved by investing in the right technology to power your VAS platform.
Chat with us today to explore how we can help you with your VAS business.