Instant, secure payment processing can accelerate business agility

The ability to make quicker, easier, cheaper and safer payments is key to making businesses agile in a rapidly evolving world. While innovation is key, the solution must be practical and meet business needs.

This is why Standard Bank South Africa expanded its Rapid Payment Platform (RPP) to enable PayShap for Corporates. This solution allows all businesses to manage high volumes of low-value payments instantly, reducing costs and improving efficiency in both payment security and the bottom line.

The mechanism behind PayShap allows payments from originators to reach beneficiaries instantly. In a business context, this means that beneficiaries can confirm that the funds are in their accounts in real-time before handing over goods or completing services.

We developed PayShap for Corporates with an understanding of the complexities of an organisation's business operations, instead of pressuring them to alter their operations for system integration. That leaves room for a focus on reaping the benefits of instant, secure payments - both inward and outward.

This may sound a lot like accepting cash, but PayShap's digital interbank service removes the security risk of cash handling on both sides of the transaction, including the costs of managing cash payments for merchants. This innovation also offers up an opportunity for businesses to tap into South Africa's unbanked market and democratise access to payments.

Real-time payment processing has a positive effect across the entire business value chain, and we see this providing significant business efficiencies and opportunities over time. By adopting the system and removing manual processes, suppliers can secure instant payments, customers can make instant payments, and the corporate can accept them all instantly.

On the supplier side – looking especially at those small and medium-sized enterprises (SMMEs) waiting for payment for goods and services they’ve supplied to other organisations – incoming payments are secured instantly, and safely. This allows businesses to provide faster services to their customers secure in the knowledge that the funds are in their account.

In Standard Bank's experience, that appetite exists. Organisations had been asking for simplicity and immediacy, and a system now exists to facilitate that. They are now able to harness the resultant efficiencies in time, reconciliation, and cost to win in their worlds.

There needs to be a shift in enterprise resource planning. The additional time will enable corporates to focus on embracing the new payment identifiers and proxies necessary for processing PayShap payments. There's no need to spend money on developing an RPP system of their own. SBSA Rapid Payment Platform (RPP) has made all of this possible with no technical development required, allowing corporations to test and learn about this new service on OneHub.

From a regulatory perspective, simplified payments don't mean lower levels of compliance. In fact, the opposite is true. The bar has now been raised. One of the regulatory requirements for accepting real-time payments is that they are subject to fraud management. Naturally, the processes must also be real time. After accepting a digital payment, the next step involves validating it for security and confirming the deposit of funds to finalise the transaction. Validation ensures the authenticity of payments received – and helps ensure that the right people are paid on the outgoing side.

We are currently operating in the most dynamic, fast-changing payment solutions in industry history. Regulations are changing rapidly; technology is evolving at unprecedented rates and new fintech solutions pop more frequently given the market demand. This is happening because there’s a constant need to improve payment mechanisms for individuals and corporates, which can be hard to keep up with. RPP is enabling PayShap for Corporates to streamline these processes and enable businesses to benefit from cutting-edge plug-and-play technology, allowing them to concentrate on innovating in their core business areas. This trend is expected to continue as functionality and adoption increase with rapid payments becoming the dominant industry payment methodology over the next few years.