BankservAfrica Selects TANGO from Lusis

​BankservAfrica, a South African leader in secure electronic payments and information switching services has selected the TANGO software solution from Lusis, a supplier of critical payments software.

Frank Pinto, BankservAfrica chief information officer (CIO), says the decision to select Lusis and TANGO was based on a rigorous selection process and the success of an extensive pilot project conducted over a period of eight months.

“A decision by our current supplier to sunset its product provided us with the perfect opportunity to conduct a thorough review of a replacement system and alternatives, while reassessing how our payments platform could become a genuine enabler of our business vision,” says Pinto. “It was critical for BankservAfrica that the solution we selected would ensure our ability to react quickly to our customers’ requirements, while allowing us to bring innovation to our business. TANGO’s technical and business architecture supports our strategic thinking around such areas as processing and cost efficiencies, payments convergence and geographical expansion,” he adds.

Pinto believes that Lusis has demonstrated the strong positive ethos and vendor reliability that allows BankservAfrica to consider them a trusted partner to its core business. “The success of the pilot project proved that TANGO not only delivered the full capability to replace our existing solution but also delivered on the promises of flexibility, agility, capability and quality. The pilot very clearly proved the rapid development and deployment capabilities of TANGO. Sign-off of the system specification to delivery of code only took three months, while full testing and acceptance took only a further four months. Going forward, these rapid development and deployment capabilities will allow us to be proactive in addressing our business needs and to offer our clients additional products and services in a much improved timeframe,” says BankservAfrica CEO Pieter Cilliers. 

According to the CEO of Lusis and Lusis Payments, Philippe Preval, pressure is coming from all corners of the value chain as new, non-traditional entrants are arriving in the payments space and increasing mandate requirements and the cost of client retention and acquisition make it more difficult to differentiate and remain price-competitive.

“We have helped BankservAfrica maximise its return on investment while lowering its total cost of ownership. The selection of TANGO will give BankservAfrica the flexibility to deliver sustainable differentiation, with a single architecture and code base for all mission critical transactions. Payments, fraud, loyalty, transport and healthcare transactions can all be processed from the same platform, sharing the same data,” explains Preval.

The implementation, across multiple sites using TANGO’s built-in high availability functions, is a collaboration between Lusis and Lusis Payments and capitalises on the recent successful porting of the TANGO product to the HP NonStop platform. ‘We invested in porting TANGO to HP NonStop specifically to address the significant opportunity that exists in retail payments on that platform, and further enhanced the commitment to the market by creating Lusis Payments,’ says Richard Launder, director of Lusis and chairman of Lusis Payments. “HP NonStop remains the platform of choice for many financial institutions, including BankservAfrica. The porting of TANGO to NonStop has truly provided a modern, flexible and robust system for the payments market.”

BankservAfrica’s partnership with Lusis is based on the proven high availability and strong performance of the TANGO technology. “The reliability and true service-orientated architecture design of the product allow us to focus on business developments to best suit the needs of our clients. We believe we have selected a robust solution and look forward to a positive relationship with Lusis,” concludes Pinto.

About BankservAfrica: Since 1972 BankservAfrica has provided interbank electronic transaction switching and settlement services to the South African banking sector and to banks in Africa: supplying quality transactions in a properly regulated system, compliant with international banking best practice and standards, while reducing risk and complexity in the industry. Africa’s largest ACH - BankservAfrica annually switches, clears and settles 1,89 billion cleared and settled transactions worth trillions of rands and is responsible for the majority of South Africa’s low-value interbank payment transactions.

Gerian Miller BankservAfrica
Tel: +27 (0) 11 497 4067
gerianm@bankservafrica.com
www.bankservafrica.com