[Article originally published on Paymentsafrika.com]

Leading Software development company, Finteq have announced a giant leap forward for Zimbabwe’s payment system.

The company’s most recent deal is with Zimswitch Zimbabwe in order to facilitate the delivery of a modern domestic interbank payment system.

Scheduled to be delivered in a series of phases, this system will support batch processing of debit and credit transactions and will eventually be extended to support Real-Time credit transactions.

The new Automated Clearing House will significantly increase the velocity of both payments and liquidity in the Zimbabwe inter-bank environment.

Payments being sent from one bank to another will be settled on the same day, and this system will support the view of moving towards a cashless society thus mitigating the challenges currently faced in Zimbabwe by the lack of physical cash.

The new Automated Clearing House is based on the open and interoperable ISO 20022 standards, similar to the solution which is currently being deployed in Namibia. It will make use of a standard recognised set of messages for the purposes of transporting payment instructions, recalls, queries and returns between participating banks.

The system offers the following high level functions:

• Credit push
• Request for debit (as opposed to debit pull) – with tracking for a configured period
• Realtime Credit capability
• Exception handling functionality
• Auto balancing to settlement
• Automatic interbank settlement calculations
• Same-day, intra-day and bulk file processing (Debit and Credit)
• Automatic store and forward capability for pre-dated transactions
• Standard interfaces between ACH and banks
• Automated file transfer mechanisms
• Operator management tools for data transfers
• Pre-validation of data before submitting to ACH (i.e. at the bank)
• Data validation at the ACH before any processing takes place
• Unique end-to-end identification of transactions through the entire transaction life-cycle
• Automated processing of all transactions
• Operator monitoring tools to ensure system health
• Manual intervention processes for ACH operations staff to intervene in processing if necessary
• Automated creation and distribution of balancing and processing reports for banks and ACH alike

Together with the system, Finteq will be offering the participant banks a standardised Payment Hub solution which facilitates integration into the Automated Clearing House, and removes barriers to entry for the banks, due to the economical pricing model.