Real-time payments market is evolving rapidly - Altech

17 Apr 2012

Business opportunities in the real time payment market are fast evolving and will continue to do so as consumer behaviour matures. Juniper Research has sized the escalating mobile payments market at US$240 billion this year and expects it to almost triple in value by 2015.

The Real Time Payment Platform (RTPP) market, especially business models supporting real time payments, has evolved rapidly and with varying degrees of consumer adoption, and mobile financial transactions are already proving to be a fertile ground for operators in emerging and mature markets.

Altech ISIS general manager Anton van Heerden says the speed of adoption is critical. "Once a payment network has achieved critical mass, it will be very difficult for new entrants to catch up and compete. This can be measured in terms of the number of active subscribers, revenue-generating transaction volume or partners in an ecosystem."

Flexible infrastructure is needed

In South Africa, the spectrum of adoption stretches across geographies and is extremely broad due to cultural differences, local regulations and disparity in the maturity of telecommunications and financial services infrastructure. As a result, organisations that want to adopt a RTTP need an open and flexible real time payment processing architecture that will readily support the rollout of new applications and services whenever the opportunities arise.

The Altech ISIS RTPP system needed to be geographically diverse, whilst offering a variety of payment methods on a technology agnostic framework in order to future proof it. "Winners in this marketplace will be those who have built a flexible and agile infrastructure that allows for the profitable delivery of specialised services, and the ability to easily and cost-efficiently scale as subscriber bases grow," Van Heerden explains.

The RTPP is at the core of the transaction processing infrastructure, it enables transaction management, distributed transaction processing, object replication and mirroring and data and service high-availability. "Success means 24/7 availability on a low-cost infrastructure. RTPP relieves service providers of the technical issues of building and maintaining the interfaces between the external vendors and their own billing systems, allowing them to concentrate on their core business."

System is functional throughout Africa

Van Heerden says collection of subscription payments can be extended to include non-banking institutions such as retail outlets and post offices. "No resources are required to develop and maintain these multiple interfaces and a web service interface enables near real time feedback on the success of any transaction. Furthermore, the RTPP system itself acts as a service activation gateway, providing a mediation layer in between provision and the back end systems."

Altech ISIS already has a pre-developed RTPP system in place that is functional throughout Africa and is driving the payments side of clients' businesses. "The market in Africa is difficult in terms of payment collection. Altech ISIS has seen phenomenal growth in alternative payment channels in the last few years and the amount of money flowing through this system is expanding exponentially. So much so that our RTPP system mediates, for one customer alone, over R3 billion a year in payment transactions throughout Africa," observes Van Heerden.