JSE Securities Exchange-listed Global Technology has embarked on a programme stretching across several African countries to relaunch its SFI payment switching solution.
Over the last 15 years SFI has become the de facto payment switching standard in Africa and other emerging territories, with banks in more than 20 countries using it, including Barclays, Stanic and Standard Chartered. SFI is made up of the Payment Switch, which is situated at banks or other financial institutions; and SFI Authenticate and/or SFI Client, the payment origination systems which are run from any organisation where payments are generated.
"SFI was developed specifically to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of payments generated by banking customers," says product sales manager Serraldi Serfontein. "SFI eliminates the generation of paper and dramatically reduces human intervention in the payments process."
SFI eases the settlement of payments generated by customers, such as salary transfers, pension payments, unemployment benefits, creditor settlements and direct debit collections. It supports the printing of secure cheques and bank-guaranteed cheques, and interfaces to inter-bank clearing.
Of particular interest to banks is the ability of the system to act as a significant revenue generator, by employing an inbuilt charging module Now, with more than 40 referenceable customers, the solution has been rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of new technologies.
The programme will run from September into next year, led by Serfontein. The new version of SFI has been written to exploit 32-bit Microsoft technology, running against SQL Server 7. This has resulted in higher performance, scalability and reliability. The new version of SFI:
* Supports multi-currency and multilingualism, important given its presence across Africa;
* Has the facility for electronic transmission of payment files;
* Allows banks to capture Waste entries;
* Incorporates a cheque clearing solution;
* Has the ability automatically to reverse unpaid items identified by the a bank`s host accounting system; and
* Has a complete bulk clearing and settlement solution used by clearing houses.
Serfontein says Glotec has run two pilot sites in Kenya, which have yielded positive results. Botswana has been targeted as the country for the next pilot site.
SFI has its roots in the Zimbabwe banking system of a decade ago, where Bill Clasquin, then an employee at a major international commercial bank, identified shortcomings in the existing payment system. It was manual, time-consuming, error-prone and inefficient. He developed SFI, which was initially marketed by Sagacious, a company subsequently acquired by Glotec.
SFI can interface directly to all major banking systems, including Globus, the core banking application in which Glotec has a direct interest through its 15% ownership of Swiss-listed Temenos.
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