The new company Stanchion Payments Solutions, made up of Stanchion and Baker Gysi & Associates, will be headquartered in Cape Town with the primary development team and support office in Johannesburg.
Stanchion Payments Solutions addresses the retail and financial services sectors, building payments systems to connect retailers to their banks. Clients include a wide range of Blue Chip and emerging banks and retailers in Africa.
"As a united company we can now do incredible things for our customers in Southern Africa. They want to know they are getting global best practice in security and governance. They want to know that no matter what conditions may be on the shop floor, their transactions are being processed flawlessly. They also want to know that they can experiment with new and more convenient ways for their customers to pay, and that our experts are on hand to plan the implementation, to optimise their systems, and to keep them running 24/7," says Graham Williams, CEO of Stanchion Payments Systems.
"Stanchion already had a pedigree and a sterling reputation for no-nonsense reliability, but we had a gap in our service offering," says Williams. "We did not have a software development team to do customised solutions. In any but the simplest EFT processing system, there is a need for custom software, where Baker Gysi and Associates (BGA) excelled. Even if a shrink-wrap solution will fit initially, businesses inevitably evolve in a way that off-the-shelf producers can never anticipate. However, BGA was not able to play in the consulting and management space. For us to join forces makes total sense for our respective customers."
This merger is a great fit: Stanchion has experience in design strategy, system implementation and long-term support, including helpdesks with water-tight processes. BGA has a team of excellent developers with a very rare set of technical skills.
"We are now a one-stop shop - we can gather requirements, design the system, put the infrastructure into place and then manage it. We will troubleshoot problems, and perform stress testing to ensure that when things get busy no cracks appear," says Shaun Baker, a founder of BGA and Stanchion's chief technology officer. "Later, as our customers grow, we can add new EFT switches, or add a capability to an existing switch."
