DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO PARTNERS WITH BANKSERVAFRICA TO USE TANGO SYSTEM

(Johannesburg, 11 August 2014) — BankservAfrica partnered with Lusis Payments to provide TANGO, a payment switching and processing software solution, in South Africa and across the African continent.

BankservAfrica’s interoperable switching platform has successfully been running on TANGO software since April 2012, and as a result BankservAfrica became a reseller in early 2014. This reseller agreement allows BankservAfrica to offer the TANGO transaction switching service for switching, authenticating and authorising transactions across multiple channels such as ATM, point-of-sale (POS), real-time credits (RTC) and the real-time account verification service (AVS-R).

Anton van der Merwe, the BankservAfrica executive responsible for this solution, explained that the TANGO system can be configured to meet a company’s required functional requirements, or an organisation can choose the full end-to-end solution. “TANGO allows for individual scalability for clients large and small, while significantly reducing costs.”

This scalability ensures that the system can meet the evolving needs of retail payment systems. Van der Merwe explained how in today’s challenging modern business, retail payment systems, which can provide increased flexibility, faster speed-to-market and increased transactional volumes, will assist in driving success for companies. The South African platform is currently running RTC, ATM, credit card (POS), debit card (POS), authenticated early debit order (AEDO) mandate registration and AVS-R.

“With the drive to implement modern payment systems in Africa,” Van der Merwe said, “the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has partnered with BankservAfrica to become the first African client outside of South Africa to deploy the TANGO solution to implement an in-country national payment switch. The DRC will be utilising ATM (single message service), credit card (dual message service), dual message clearing and settlement (DMCS) and settlement.”

“The opportunity to expand TANGO’s payments reach beyond South Africa, into other parts of Africa, is exciting,” said Philippe Preval, president of Lusis Payments. “TANGO is a sophisticated payments system and will continue to serve BankservAfrica and the DRC’s needs.” Since going live with TANGO in 2012, BankservAfrica has unlocked a variety of benefits, such as a 66 percent reduction of operational software licensing cost and a potential saving of 75 percent on future hardware costs.

​Van der Merwe explained that even though the rollout of TANGO in South Africa being one of the more complex industry projects, the project was delivered on time and under budget. “Today South Africa has a trusted payments platform, with enhanced flexibility and responsiveness. This truly scalable and proven architecture can translate into lower costs for low-volume clients,” he said.