RTC Overview
Real-time clearing (RTC) is a service that allows payers to credit a beneficiary account in real time. Clearing can take up to 60 seconds, while settlement can take about an hour.
An RTC transaction consists of two legs:
- A verification leg that checks that a beneficiary account is valid and active.
- A confirmation or clearing leg during which the funds are actually transferred to the payee.
Transaction limits for RTC differ depending on the day of the week and the time of day (see table below).
| Day | Time | Transaction Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Monday to Friday | 00:00 - 16:00 | R5 million |
| Monday to Friday | 16:01 - 23:59 | R250 000 |
| Saturday, Sunday, public holidays | All day | R250 000 |
Electrum’s RTC solution enables you to send outbound and receive inbound RTC payments.
Electrum also has the ability to help perform fraud assessment in the case of outbound RTC payments. To do this Electrum must integrate into your own fraud check system. Note that this is an optional add-on feature that you may wish to implement.
Fraud Assessment for Outbound RTC
This optional fraud assessment step works as follows:
A would-be payer initiates an outbound payment from an account held at your bank and Electrum receives that outbound message.
- Electrum submits that message to your fraud check system.
- Your system checks for signs of fraud. In some cases you may need to reach out to your customer to verify identity or conduct a manual investigation. This step could therefore take some time to complete.
- You respond to Electrum indicating that the transaction is or is not deemed to be fraudulent.
- Based on this response, Electrum will proceed to send the payment on to industry or will stop the transaction and send you a message saying that the payment has been rejected.
Note that the fraud assessment step may take up to 1-2 hours to complete if an investigation is pending.
This leads to the risk that a transaction from start to end could fall across two transaction windows, and that a transaction that was valid at the time of payment initiation could later be rejected due to a change in transaction limits.
For example, say that a bank customer initiates an outbound RTC payment of R1 million at 15:30 on Friday afternoon. The fraud assessment system flags the entity or transaction as possibly fraudulent, and initiates an investigation that takes 1 hour. Now, even if the investigation shows that the entity and transaction are legitimate, by the time the clearing step is initiated the payment amount exceeds the RTC transaction limit of R250 000 for weekdays after 16:00. The transaction is therefore rejected.
The customer will be informed that the transaction was rejected due to the scheme limit being exceeded. They can either retry payment immediately using a lower payment amount, or can wait for the next window that allows the original payment amount.