Massive business opportunities are emerging in the real-time payment market and these will continue to flourish as consumer behaviour matures.
So says Altech ISIS GM Anton van Heerden, who argues that the Real-Time Payment Platform (RTPP) market, especially business models supporting real-time payments, has evolved rapidly and with varying degrees of consumer adoption.
He adds that mobile financial transactions are already proving to be a fertile ground for operators in emerging and mature markets.
According to Juniper Research, the mobile payments market this year is worth $240 billion and is expected to almost triple in value by 2015.
Van Heerden believes the speed of adoption is critical. “Once a payment network has achieved critical mass, it will be very difficult for new entrants to catch up and compete. This can be measured in terms of the number of active subscribers, revenue-generating transaction volume or partners in an ecosystem.”
In SA, he explains, the spectrum of adoption stretches across geographies and is extremely broad due to cultural differences, local regulations and disparity in the maturity of telecommunications and financial services infrastructure.
As a result, organisations that want to adopt an RTTP need an open and flexible real-time payment processing architecture that will readily support the rollout of new applications and services whenever opportunities arise, Van Heerden adds.
“Winners in this marketplace will be those who have built a flexible and agile infrastructure that allows for the profitable delivery of specialised services, and the ability to easily and cost-efficiently scale as subscriber bases grow,” he explains.
In a statement, Altech ISIS says RTPP is at the core of transaction processing infrastructure, as it enables transaction management, distributed transaction processing, object replication and mirroring, and data and service high-availability.
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