No compromise uptime, availability and reliability

With an innovative approach to exposing full-blown banking services to emerging markets, where the majority of the population is 'unbanked' Nasdaq-listed Net1 has turned the financial services market on its head.

The company boasts deployments in Africa and has numerous projects in the pipeline for other emerging markets, and is partnering with governments to change the financial services landscape. Net1's solution is becoming intrinsic in governments rolling out plans for e-government.

Although the company's innovative approach to financial services is designed to thrive in relatively unsophisticated markets, where technology and infrastructure are not all that prolific, like any player in the financial services space, the uptime and availability of its IT systems are key success factors imperative to its success.

When it came to choosing a server platform, Net1 didn't compromise. The return on investment it received on its purchase of Stratus technology at its inception speaks for itself.

The company's sentiments are probably best epitomised by Senior VP of IT, Nitin Soma's comments: "Downtime? We don't know the meaning of the word."

With deployments in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria, Namibia, Burundi, Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, Net1's solutions currently enable in the region of 4 million people who generally have limited or no access to a bank account to engage affordably into electronic transactions with each other, government agencies, employers, merchants and other financial service providers.

Its solution hinges on its Universal Electronic Payment System (UEPS), which uses secure smart cards operating in real-time, but offline scenario.

This approach overcomes numerous logistical barriers, since unlike traditional payment systems offered by major banking institutions that require immediate access through a communications network to a centralised computer, immediate connectivity to a host system is not an absolute requirement to the systems functioning.

Users of Net1's system can enter into transactions at any time with other cardholders in even the most remote areas, providing that a portable offline smart card reader is available.

Unlike a traditional credit or debit card where the operation of the account occurs on a centralised computer, each of Net1's smart cards effectively operates similar to an individual bank account in the case of financial services, or an individual record management system in the case of medical services.

All transactions that take place through Net1's system occur between two smart cards at the point of service, or POS, with all of the relevant information necessary to perform and record a transaction held on the smart cards.

The transfer of money or other information can take place without any communication with a centralised computer, since all validation, creation of audit records, encryption, decryption and authorisation take place on, or are generated between, the smart cards themselves.

Importantly, the cards are protected through the use of biometric fingerprint identification, which is designed to ensure the security of funds and cardholder information.

Merchants and other commercial participants in the system generally settle transactions by sending transaction data to a mainframe computer on a batch basis.

Settlements can be performed online or offline. The mainframe computer provides a central database of transactions, creating a complete audit trail that enables Net1 to replace lost smart cards while preserving the notional account balance, and to identify fraud.

In addition to payments and purchases, the system can be used for banking, healthcare management, international money transfers, voting and identification.

Net1's UEPS technology is already widely deployed in South Africa, with over 3.3 million clients in five provinces receiving social welfare grants using Net1's smart cards.

The company has also started to implement its UEPS for employers to pay wages and provide financial services to their employees. Additionally, Net1 is working closely with non-governmental organisations to deploy a new medical application into a number of hospitals and clinics. This application will be used to administer the treatment of HIV/AIDS and other high-risk diseases, record patient progress and manage drug inventory.

Outside of South Africa, the Reserve Bank of Malawi has implemented Net1's set of solutions as a national payment system. To date, seven local financial institutions and BP PLC are also using the system for transaction switching and settlement.

Net1 has deployed smaller, more limited versions of its UEPS system in Burundi, Ghana, Latvia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

It is estimated that four billion people across the globe currently don't have access to these services, making the potential for growth of Net1's suite of solutions massive.

Considering the company's back-end today processes R5 billion worth of transactions each month, any potential for growth is compelling.

With a background in building IT solutions for the financial services industry that stretches back 18 years, Net1's company founders have always used Stratus' technologies.

"Stratus was the most fault-tolerant platform available 18 years ago and that's still the case today - it's truly the Rolls Royce of computing platforms," says Soma.

"In the 18 years I've been working with Stratus technology, I've only seen a system failure twice - once when a software glitch was detected and on another when it took a cleaner unplugging both redundant power sources to down the Stratus box."

Adding to reliability, resilience and fault tolerance of the Stratus hardware, Soma says the after sales and technical support Net1 has received from Stratus in all regions has been amazing.

"Stratus is very accommodating of its clients on every front, always going the extra mile and allocating time to spend with you when you need them.

"While many companies believe the technology should speak for itself when it comes to reliability, resilience and fault-tolerance, how approachable and professional your technology partner's support staff are becomes of massive importance when something goes wrong.

"Thankfully, we've never had reason to question that," Soma adds.

Soma says Stratus also protects its customers' investments by constantly evolving its platforms and making use of the latest technologies. "While you would expect the latest computing developments to be incompatible with Stratus' solutions, because the company is so heavily focused on excellence and no-compromise uptime, the latest processors, memory technologies and other performance driving components are constantly being integrated into their new solutions.

"For us, this means that our investment in the Stratus platform is being taken care of, that resilience, reliability and fault-tolerance doesn't mean a trade off in performance and that the latest cost benefits are being taken advantage of.

"We are truly satisfied with every aspect of our relationship with Stratus," he concludes.

One doesn't have to necessarily take Soma's word for it though. In 15 years, he has never seen an outage - that's impressive, regardless of how you look at it.