The Central Bank of Iceland has chosen SIA, a European vendor in payment infrastructures and services, to implement and support the new real-time gross settlement system RTGS and the new instant payment platform. SIA will use its wholly-owned subsidiary Perago, based in Pretoria South Africa, specialised in central bank solutions.
Perago is a global vendor in designing and implementing highly specialised mission critical solutions. Perago is an innovative company delivering high quality cost effective solutions which include payment systems: Real Time Gross Settlement, Automated Clearing House, Instant Payments and Government Payments; securities management systems: Central Securities Depository and Collateral Management; and Smart application integration solutions: Straight Through Processing and Payment Hub.
Perago is a member of the SIA Group and traces its origins back to 1999 when a small team of central bankers decided to use their expertise and experience to build a commercial enterprise focused on financial infrastructure. Trust, business knowledge and innovation is the trademark of Perago in helping central institutions, banks and brokers to streamline any business process quickly and cost effectively.
These technology infrastructures developed by SIA, planned to go live in 2018, will replace Central Bank of Iceland’s current mainframe-based real-time solutions for high and low-value payment systems, which have been operating since 2001. SIA will use its wholly-owned subsidiary Perago, based in Pretoria South Africa, specialised in central bank solutions.
Central Bank of Iceland manages all interbank payments in the country. Despite the small population, it processes quite a significant daily volume of transactions: up to 1 million payments with a peak of 160,000 per hour. Central Bank of Iceland has decided to move towards a more strategic, modern and cost-effective infrastructure.
Central Bank of Iceland will be able to benefit from seamless integration among Perago’s RTGS, Instant Payment and Payhub solutions. Furthermore, Central Bank of Iceland will differentiate itself from standard models that traditionally split high and low-value payments, by implementing a new model based on a single system which processes each type of payment Bank to Bank, P2P or B2B in a different way, while ensuring that all transactions can be exchanged using a single domestic message standard. This new approach puts Central Bank of Iceland at the forefront of the payment system infrastructure evolution.
Guðmundur Kr. Tómasson, Director of Financial Market Infrastructure at Central Bank of Iceland, said Central Bank of Iceland decided to accept the bid from SIA after thorough consideration: “We look forward to using SIA’s systems, which will also enable us to cooperate closer with our Nordic neighbors in this field.”
“We are honored to have signed this agreement with Central Bank of Iceland, confirming us as leading provider for central banks in the Nordic region after Sweden, Norway and Denmark,” commented Massimo Arrighetti, CEO of SIA.
“With Central Bank of Iceland, the number of central banks in the world which have decided to use SIA’s state-of-the-art technologies to develop their own payment infrastructures has risen to 15, across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania. We are also very pleased to implement for the first time an instant payment system completely managed by a central bank.”
