The long-standing partnership between Bytes and Volante is now helping South African banks to convert their back office systems to comply with a new standard for cross-border payments clearing.
The standard, called SADC Payments, will take full effect in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries early next year.
The reason for the new standard is to support the governments of the SADC region’s stated goal to harmonise payment infrastructures, particularly for high-volume, low-value transactions. This is part of the drive to make banking more accessible to all people in the region by reducing the costs associated with cross-border remittances.
The new SADC payment formats are based on the ISO 20022 XML messaging standard. ISO 20022 is the new global standard for financial messaging and is already the basis for more than 60 market initiatives taking place around the world including SEPA payments and Target2 Securities in Europe, automated funds messaging around the world, DTCC corporate actions in the USA, and BOJNET clearing in Japan to name but a few.
“There is growing pressure within financial institutions to standardise their message development and processing services so they can successfully address the challenges of ISO 20022 based initiatives,” says Mark Neethling, general manager financial services at Bytes Universal Systems. “The SADC initiative is just the latest in an ever increasing list of ISO 20022 based projects that banks will face. Bytes and Volante have created a solution, that not only address the immediate needs of SADC payments integration and compliance, but also enables the long term standardisation of the banks ISO 20022 message support capabilities”
The product Neethling refers to is called the SADC Enabler. It incorporates all the software, services and testing a bank needs to rapidly convert its exiting back office into a SADC-compliant environment. An important, significant added benefit of implementing the SADC Enabler is the fact that the bank is simultaneously preparing itself to efficiently address subsequent ISO 20022 based projects. .
The SADC Enabler was launched at the 2014 SWIFT Africa Conference in Marrakech earlier this year. “We have received considerable interest from potential clients,” says Neethling. “The banks know that they have to adapt to the change in standard and they are under pressure to cut costs and become more competitive. The SADC Enabler solution serves both these purposes.”
The Bytes-Volante partnership
Volante is a global leader in the provision of financial data integration systems. Their tool set enables clients in the financial services industry to manage the complex, diverse and ever increasing range of financial messages that are used for straight-through processing and payment systems.
Bytes Universal Systems is the exclusive distributor of Volante technologies in South Africa.
The big benefit to customers from using the Volante tool set is the ability to reduce the time to market when adapting existing or developing new message formats and integration. For example, when a bank acquires a new corporate as a client, the two organisations’ financial systems must be able to communicate successfully to enable automated electronic transactions. The conversion process involved can be long and laborious.
Volante technology cuts down on development time, resulting in lower costs and an earlier start time for revenue generation for the bank. The bank also has the ability to do their own messaging development quickly and effectively, furthering the bank’s capacity to introduce new products into the market.
