Product overview

The Electrum Money Transfer Retailer Service allows consumers to send money to a recipient by means of a cash voucher. Transfers can be sent from either a digital channel, where funds are paid in from a bank account or digital wallet, or a retailer point of sale (POS), where funds are paid in cash. Money Transfer vouchers can be redeemed for cash at a retailer POS or automated teller machine (ATM).

The Electrum Money Transfer Retailer Service facilitates cash voucher transactions between incoming channels and a variety of domestic money transfer service providers. The service supports the following basic functions:

• Create or update customer
• Look up customer
• Create order
• Look up order
• Redeem order
• Update order PIN

High-Level Architecture

The figure below depicts the high-level architecture of the Electrum Money Transfer Retailer Service. The originating system, which could be a mobile or web channel, in-store POS, or ATM, communicates with the Electrum Switch via the Electrum Money Transfer Retailer Interface. The Electrum Switch in turn connects to multiple service providers. Electrum Finance supports transaction matching, reconciliation, and financial reporting. The Electrum Console is the system's user interface which provides tools for transaction lookup, configuration, reporting, and the aforementioned back-office functions.

Service Providers

The issuing and management of money transfer orders are undertaken by a money transfer operator or service provider. The Electrum Money Transfer Retailer Service supports domestic money transfer products offered by the following service providers:

• Absa
• African Bank
• Capitec
• Investec
• Nedbank
• Old Mutual
• Standard Bank of South Africa
• Vodacom
• MTN MoMo
• Tyme Payout
• Postbank
• Pay At
• First National Bank

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

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

Transaction Lookup

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.