BPC Banking Technologies, a provider of payment solutions, announced the launch of the national payment system of Ethiopia, EthSwitch SC based on SmartVista. As of today for the first time, all 17 of the countries retail banks are connected together via the unified payment system. EthSwitch was formed by all the banks in Ethiopia, and with the backing of the Ethiopian Bankers’ Association and the country’s central bank known as the National Bank of Ethiopia. Following the implementation of the SmartVista suite all the banks’ payments are now centralised.
The key aim of the project was to bring interoperability to the country, as a result clients of any Ethiopian retail bank may access services via all the ATMs in the country for cash withdrawals, make POS payments in any terminal and utilize cheque balancing. With SmartVista as the core of the whole system this has also enabled smaller banks to issue and acquire cards on their own and in addition benefit from outsourced processing.
Ato Bizuneh Bekele, CEO of EthSwitch SC said, “All connected member banks now benefit from interoperability as well as providing a new level of convenience and access to Ethiopian citizens, merchants, and organizations. As a result of our relationship with BPC Banking Technologies, it became obvious that the new system powered by SmartVista, that the Ethiopian financial ecosystem will find new levels of efficiency, availability and accessibility while also significantly reducing the levels of cash usage.”
“Currently the system integrates over 1,500 ATMS, over 13,000 POS-terminals, and 2.5 million cardholders all over the country. These numbers are expected to grow further due to the ease of use for customers and hence the demand that the interoperability which just went operational will create. We aim to use this foundation to launch further e-Payment services so as to bring about greater financial inclusion to Ethiopia”, adds Ato Bizuneh.
“With the deployment of SmartVista, we are proud to help drive such a vital project for Ethiopia’s national economy. As of today for the first time all the retail banks in the country are switched to our single processing platform acting as the central core for payments in the country. With interoperability delivered for the first time this will see transaction volumes continue to grow benefiting, consumers, banks and merchants”, says Daryl Berg, Managing Director BPC Banking Technologies, Sub-Sahara Africa.
BPC Banking Technologies is a global leader in payments solutions with 159 clients in 56 countries globally. It is the architect and developer of SmartVista, a complete e-payments solution delivering high performance authorisation switching and routing, ATM and POS management, card management, advanced fraud prevention, loyalty program management, card personalisation and production, billing and merchant management, microfinance, integrated internet and mobile banking.
EthSwitch was formed in 2011, through shareholding of all licensed banks in Ethiopia, and the National Bank of Ethiopia, to provide a national switch system for all financial institutions. The national switch system is part of the National Bank of Ethiopia’s National Payment Strategy.
BPC Banking Technologies also recently tested the HPE Integrity Superdome X server to verify the performance and availability as well as compatibility of SmartVista suite and HPE mission-critical x86 servers as part of the Global Alliance strategy between BPC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Test scenarios replicated a series of real-life business workloads of stand-in authorisation and transactions switching. The stand-in authorisation benchmarked the environment of 1,000,000 card accounts, 100,000 POS-terminals and 10,000 ATMs to prove the availability of the system within POS-based purchases and balance inquiries as well as ATM cash withdrawals. During this test BPC SmartVista on the HPE Superdome X platform performed 3,200 TPS of sustained load. The transaction switching scenario of testing demonstrated 3,800 TPS, resulting in over 13.6 million operations per hour and requests from acquirer’s channels to international payment systems.
