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An update on the features of SmartVista's Instant Payments Solution

Nadia Benaissa Apr 27, 2021 11:44:03 AM

In a changing global digital commerce landscape, the traditional interbank payment systems are no longer meeting the expectations of consumers and businesses, who are very much used to instantaneous access to information, goods, and services. As a result, the industry embarked on a journey towards real-time payments and new payment schemes are emerging globally. These new payment schemes combine the best of both worlds – they offer real-time transaction authorization which is common practice in the card payments space with rich data formats and accessibility that typically exists around the account to account payments.

This year marks the introduction of our Instant Payment offering for central banks and national payment systems as part of our SmartVista suite. Instant Payments, often referred to as faster payment or real-time payments have been adopted by large central banks worldwide, in Europe, China, India, the USA, the UK, and Australia. Today, there are over 70 instant payment-enabled central banks worldwide. Over 200 national payment systems and central banks are yet to adopt instant payments.

SmartVista’s Instant Payments solution allows a bank or a payment provider to process incoming and outgoing real-time transfers and payments. The solution offers to streamline instant payments processing and the underlying platform supports multiple CSMs as well as multiple channels in a unified, highly available, and secure way. The solution can also seamlessly integrate with various internal systems to provide message enrichment, liquidity management, and other capabilities.

The following features are a sneak-peak into the progress of our instant payment solution suite:

SmartVista Instant Payment Core Platform

The SmartVista Instant Payment Solution uses the existing architecture components of our SmartVista platform with modifications to ensure real-time payment operations. The architecture is highly modular as it utilises the flexibilty of the SmartVista back office to configure accounting rules of Instant Payment setup.
The configuration capabilities of the SmartVista Integration Platform are used to create sets of business processes for various Instant Payment use cases such as E-Mandate creation, addressing services, and more.

SmartVista Instant Payment Modules

The SmartVista Integration Platform is the main transaction processing engine and payment middleware. All external ISO20022 connections from participants are terminated here. The platform implements the business processes and orchestrates the flows across modules such as the e-mandate module, the addressing module, disputes module, notification service, back-office module, fraud management, and the participant portal.

Mobile App Support Services

As part of the SmartVista Instant Payment Solution prototype, we have also built an impressive instant payment mobile app to showcase all the features of the solution system. The mobile app supports services like P2P transfer, address registration and modification, Request-To-Pay, and E-Mandate management.

A Two-layered Accounting Structure

The most innovative feature introduced is a two-layered accounting structure. It provides an unlimited direct-to-indirect participant liquidity management function. In an instant payment scheme, there are bank and non-bank entities. The liquidity management of non-banking entities becomes a challenge as these institutions do not hold a funding account in a central bank, and allowing them to participate in a payment scheme brings a risk of maintaining the minimum liquidity necessary to perform transactions.

Shaped with the Latest Technology Framework

The SmartVista Instant Payment Solution is not only capable of basic P2P transfers, but also supports add-on services such as Request-to-Pay, e-Mandate management, direct debit transfer, and a web portal. The web portal, due to the latest technology used, is much faster and easy to roll out.

Multiple Settlement Options

The industry now expects an instant payment system to offer multiple settlement options, ranging from a traditional deferred net settlement on a T+1 basis to line-by-line, real-time gross settlement of transactions. The SmartVista Instant Payment Solution now supports the full range of settlement types where the back office has been enabled to support real-time account posting and balance update while the customer completes the transaction.

E-mandate Overlay Service

It offers direct debit authority creation over the central SmartVista scheme. Using the mobile app of the participant, a biller or merchant can initiate an E-Mandate request, which would need to be authorised by the account holder before it is activated in the SmartVista Instant Payment Solution system. E-mandate beside billers and merchants can also be initiated by a customer.

Request to Pay

It is a highly innovative overlay service that enables payees to request funds from the payer. In other words, the payee can pull funds from the payer account after authorization and authentication from the payer end-user. Various uses cases of Request to Pay can be offered to participants from SmartVista Instant Payment Solution for instance; instant payment from merchant to the customer, payment guarantee from merchant to customer, pre-authorisation request from a merchant to the customer, payment in installments, payments in the future and change of the amount of payment.

Facilitate Bulk Payments

It is possible to initiate bulk payments to beneficiary participants. For instance, in the case of social spending disbursements, a government agency can stage a payment file via Participant Portal which can be then debulked and transmitted to the beneficiary banks and fintech in real-time. As a result, the disbursement of government social spending can be digitized, creating greater transparency and accountability, as compared to manual disbursement which is a highly inefficient and unreliable process.

The SmartVista Instant Payment Solution is fully API enabled and PSD2 ready. SmartVista can deliver Instant Payments and Open Banking onto the same platform and create the end to end environment that is the foundation for the true digital banking system. To know more, get in touch with our experts for a free discovery workshop now.