Enterprise Payments Channel Overview
Electrum's Enterprise Payments Channel (EPC) solution enables corporates, merchants, and third party payment providers (referred to as corporate clients, or clients) to make use of a sponsor bank’s National Payment System (NPS) payment processing streams to receive or make payments. This allows clients to perform certain payment processing functions similarly to the sponsor bank.
Speak to the sponsor bank regarding the use and terms of the EPC solution BEFORE you integrate with Electrum. You are a customer of the bank and not of Electrum – the bank will ensure that you have a merchant account (also referred to as a pool account or transactional account) against which all your payments can be processed. Electrum's role is to expose the bank's processing engine to your system via an integration layer by providing you with the API and supporting collateral, and to assist your development and testing teams during your onboarding process.
Architecture
The diagram below shows the EPC solution architecture.
The sponsor bank makes the Enterprise Payments Channel solution available to you via an API and integration layer managed by Electrum. This forms part of the payments processing engine and is responsible for orchestration of transaction messages between the client and all relevant sponsor bank systems.
The client can initiate outbound payments, process inbound proxy resolution requests when needed, and receive payment notification outcomes after successful completion of inbound and outbound payment transactions.
Clients can also opt to participate in the authorisation process during a payment’s processing.
BankservAfrica processes all inter-bank payments for the various NPS schemes. This allows for a corporate client's customers to transact with not just accounts held at the sponsor bank, but also other financial institutions on the NPS network.
In cases where the client and their customer happen to bank with the same bank (i.e., the sponsor bank), then any EPC payments between them will be processed internally by the bank and will not go through BankservAfrica. These are referred to in the industry as 'on-us' payments.
For each completed transaction, Electrum is able to reconcile the client’s record with the corresponding record from the EPC processing engine and to provide reconciliation, or recon, reports.
Alternatively, Electrum can supply a daily transaction extract file to the client with all transactions processed that day, in order to let the client reconcile these records with their own.
The decision to make use of the first option (referred to as ‘Electrum full recon’) or the second (referred to as ‘Electrum extracts only’) should be made by the corporate client in consultation with their sponsor bank.
Use Cases
The Electrum Enterprise Payments solution allows partners to do the following:
Currently Supported
Receive payments
Real-time clearing of inbound payments from consumers into the corporate client's merchant account.
Collect payments
Corporate clients can prompt consumers to make payments to their merchant account.
Send payments
Make real-time bulk or individual payments to consumers from a pre-funded merchant account.
Payment Schemes
The following payment schemes are supported under Electrum’s EPC Solution.
Currently Supported
Coming Soon
- RTC
- EFT-Debit
- EFT-Credit
- AC (Authenticated collections, also known as Debicheck)
- AVS-R (Real-time account verification service)
- AVS-B (Batch account verification service)
Electrum will support inbound and outbound payments for each payment stream. These are independent services and it is possible to implement one or the other, or both, according to your requirements.
Inbound payments are incoming payments sent from your customer to you. Outbound payments are outgoing payments that you send to your customers.