Product overview

The Electrum Account Payment Service Interface facilitates the processing of third-party bill and traffic fine payment requests, account payments, and payments into wallets originating from banks, retailers, or digital channels. The Electrum platform processes incoming requests by translating the messages and routing them as needed to multiple service providers.

High-Level Architecture

The figure below depicts the high-level architecture of the Account Payment Service Interface. The originating system – which could be a digital channel, or an in-store point of sale – communicates with the Electrum Switch via the Account Payments Service Interface. The Electrum Switch in turn connects to multiple service providers. Electrum Finance supports transaction matching, reconciliation, and financial reporting, while the Electrum Console is the system's user interface which provides tools for transaction lookup, configuration, reporting, and back-office functions.

Service Providers

The table below shows the service providers currently supported by the Account Payment Service Interface and the supported bill types.

Routing

Some of the common routing methods are described below.

Prefix Routing

Most standard bills are routed via the prefix of the account reference number encapsulated in the accountRef field of the request message. You can read more about bill payment reference numbers here.

Traffic Fine Routing

Each customer has a priority list of service providers for traffic fine payments. The first provider on the list is the preferred provider and the rest are listed in order of decreasing priority. Traffic fine payments are routed via broadcasting coupled with priority listing as follows.

The referenceNumber of the bill lookup request is populated with either a traffic fine notice number or a consumer's national ID number. The request is broadcast to all service providers who support traffic fine payments. If more than one provider returns a success response, the preferred provider will be chosen for the payment transaction. If the preferred provider does not return a response, or returns an error, then the provider with next highest priority will be chosen.

Biller Routing

Certain bills can be routed to a preferred service provider chosen by the originating system. In this case the receiver.id field must be populated with the appropriate institution identifier to indicate the preferred provider. The values to be populated will be provided by Electrum. An example of this is Multichoice bills which could be routed to either Box Office or DSTV. In these scenarios, the service provider functions as both the provider and the biller. Electrum now also supports MomentCo Multichoice bills.

Electrum Finance

Electrum Finance is a collection of tools to facilitate the reconciliation of transaction records between multiple parties, calculation of principal settlement amounts and fees, and generation of reports required for finance processes.

For more details of the processes and available features, see our Electrum Finance pages as well as this section of the Electrum Console help guide.

Support and Monitoring

The Transactions screen of the Electrum Console provides a detailed view of each transaction processed by the Electrum Switch. Here you can perform the following to help troubleshoot potential issues:

• Filter transactions based on various parameters
• Search for a specific transaction by its unique reference
• View a summary of pertinent data for individual transactions
• View the full request and response message traces between the originating system and the Electrum Switch
• View the full request and response message traces between the Electrum Switch and the service provider

For more details on how to utilise these features, see the Transactions page of the Electrum Console help guide.

Kibana Dashboards

Electrum uses the Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK) stack for low-level application monitoring. To assist you with supporting your services, we provide you with access to preconfigured Kibana dashboards to visualise traffic being processed by the Electrum Switch. The following dashboards are available:

• Message overview
• Message cog detail
• Health check
• Store-and-forward (SAF) queue

Alerts are also configured to send email notifications when the system health changes.

For more details on each dashboard type and its use, see the Monitoring and Alerts page.

Connectivity and Security

The standard connectivity and security between the originating system and the Electrum Switch is via HTTPS using basic authentication and server-side SSL. This requires that endpoints are allowlisted. The following additional security options are also available if required:

• HTTPS using basic authentication or OAuth2
• HTTPS using basic authentication or OAuth2 in conjunction with mTLS1.2+
• Connection via VPN

See here for more information about authentication options.