Hot on the heels of its R3.5-billion acquisition of Payfast, MEA-focused digital payments leader Network International has reaffirmed its interest in the South African market with a R500-million investment to deploy its processing capabilities.

The company announced that its cloud-based, integrated payment suite for merchants, banks, Fintechs and MNOs will be hosted and operated in South Africa from June 2023.

The move is also to comply with the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) directive issued in 2021 which requires all transaction data in the payments ecosystem to be processed and stored, within the borders of South Africa.

Chris Wood, Regional Managing Director, Southern Africa at Network International, said, “What we are doing now is bringing Southern Africa its very own on-soil cloud hosted version. Having technology customised to meet the growing demand from a broad segment of South African customers and plugging directly into BankServ, Visa, and Mastercard locally has been warmly welcomed by existing Southern African clients and has already secured significant interest from potential clients in the retail, banking, Fintech and telco space. The strategic decision to invest significantly in on-soil processing capability is in support of the ever-growing need for localisation and the directives of the Reserve Bank of South Africa.”

Wood said, “With our state-of-the-art digital payments technology built, hosted and maintained locally we will accelerate building new products that are relevant for South Africa. More importantly our clients’ customisation needs will get immediate attention. This gives us the edge over our competitors, most of whom have yet to, or may not, make the same commitment.”

The company said its digital payments platform has at its core a global card management system (CMS) for issuing clients to manage and host card credentials, and Network’s “Ngenius” acquirer processing capability for a broad range of merchant services, whether e-commerce or in stores.

It added that the API-rich interfaces are designed for speed and flexibility, “allowing clients to quickly and easily integrate into its core capabilities and bolt on third party partners across a range of services. The platform will be hosted in South Africa on Amazon’s new installation of its Africa AWS.”

Wood said, “We see the Network South Africa platform investment as an important strategic step forward in becoming a truly local provider. Our clients can look forward to continued innovation as the Network South Africa platform continues to evolve. Already able to process more than 3000 transactions per second, it is a resilient, secure and agile platform to help banks, Fintechs, telcos and retailers provide market leading products and experiences in a low risk and compliant technology environment.”