SIA Group enters African card payments sector

Perago, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SIA, has signed an agreement with Swish Payments Ltd., a mobile commerce provider owned by leading South African payment service provider Setcom Payment Solutions, to support its new m-commerce initiative in Africa and Europe.

Through SIA’s technology infrastructure, P erago w ill enable the Swish solution that utilises a mobile app and card reader (both chip and magnetic stripe ard) to effectively convert a merchant’s smartphone or tablet into a POS terminal so businesses of all sizes can accept debit and credit card payments from virtually any location.

Perago will specifically provide Swish with the SIA gateway for payment switching to all internationalcircuits in co njunction with a PCI-compliant Acquirer Independent solution for transaction authorisation and clearing.

The SIA technology platform will be combined with the Swish solution to provide seamless integration with multiple acquirers in multiple countries, giving Swish the capability to serve varied geographic locations rapidly with its state of the art mPOS solution.

Swish Payments will be launching the new mobile POS solution in Africa and in 20 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom) starting later this year. According to its forecasts, Swish expects to reach about 400,000 merchant subscribers by the end of 2016.

“In addition to our proven experience in creating advanced systems for central banks, RTGS in particular, starting today Perago opens up its infrastructures to new services such as payment card transaction management. With this in mind, our agreement with Swish Payments represents an important milestone for SIA Group as this is the first card processing agreement in Africa, and it allows us to expand our portfolio with the integrated offer of the parent company SIA,” said Claudio Ceresani, CEO of Perago.

“The deal with SIA is a critical component of our offer as it allows us to count on an established processing infrastructure. It also allows us to focus our efforts on the business and enhance the Swish value proposition for our customers,” said Stephen Grech, CEO of Swish Payments Ltd.

source: Biztech Africa