The Challenge

A leading South African international banking and wealth management group has approached Synthesis to assist them with the building of their next-gen payments platform and enable delivery of PayShap on it.

Bank strategic intent is to modernise the legacy banking systems and to build a cloud based next generation payments platform which aims to unify payment processing into a single API driven platform which is highly customisable and provides a single interface into the payments' backbone. This payments platform will initially serve as the foundation for PayShap and eventually will support all payment types.

The Solution

Synthesis assisted the bank in building one of the foundational blocks of their unified payments platform that is instrumental for processing PayShap payments, and also helped the bank to modernise their payments technology architecture. The architecture is built on an event driven model which is known to provide lower latency for real-time processing. This also helps in decoupling the various systems within a bank thereby reducing failure points. To execute the desired solution, Synthesis combined strong domain expertise in payments with technical competence in Microsoft Azure, API build, Akka.NET, and DevOps.

The Results

The solution has provided the bank with a scalable, reliable, high performing platform that delivers operational efficiency, simplified governance and improved customer experience. The platform is built to cater for the futuristic needs of the bank by placing strong emphasis on cloud native - micro-service driven architecture. This platform currently only supports PayShap payments but in future will be enhanced to support high value as well as mass payments.

With a platform built for the future and an ability to process PayShap transactions which is the need of the hour - the bank is geared up for their payment’s modernisation journey, and this is only the beginning.

PayShap was born out of the Payments Industry-led Rapid Payments Programme (RPP), which officially kicked off in 2019 to collectively design a viable alternative to cash payments, with a core focus on humanising digital payments for all South Africans.