SIA Group Launches into African Market with M-commerce
SIA Group’s South African subsidiary, Perago, has signed an agreement with Swish Payments, a mobile commerce provider owned by South African payment service provider Setcom Payment Solutions, to support its new mobile commerce (m-commerce) initiative in Africa and Europe.
Through SIA’s technology infrastructure, Perago will enable the Swish solution that utilises a mobile app and card reader (both chip and magnetic stripe card) to convert a merchant’s smartphone or tablet into a point of sale (POS) terminal so businesses of all sizes can accept debit and credit card payments from virtually any location.
Perago will also provide Swish with the SIA gateway for payment switching to all international circuits in conjunction with a Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant acquirer independent solution for transaction authorisation and clearing. The SIA technology platform will be combined with the Swish solution to integrate 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, which originally launched in Hong Kong in December 2012, 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 and the UK) 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, real time gross settlement (RTGS) in particular, starting today Perago opens up its infrastructures to new services such as payment card transaction management,” said Claudio Ceresani, chief executive (CEO) of Perago.
“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.”