Interswitch Transnational, a leading pan-African integrated payments company with operations in Nigeria and a growing presence in West and East Africa, says its Switching and Processing division ("Interswitch S & P") has completed third party payment processing integration with Visa.
The completion of the integration agreement with Visa means that Interswitch S & P has become the fi rst company in Nigeria to be able to perform in-country switching and third party processing for all card brands, including: Verve (the domestic scheme) and international cards such as Discover, Visa, MasterCard, and Union Pay.
Interswitch Switching and Processing offers 3 shared, market facing services to financial institutions and retail businesses in the market it operates, including: Pureplayswitch Service through which it offers on interbank transaction switching, Transpro Service that provides 3rd party issuer/ acquirer processing for major card schemes, and Reward Service that delivers multi-channel loyalty to banks, merchants and their customers.
This is in addition to standard back offi ce services such as fraud management, dispute resolution, clearing and settlement as well as reporting and reconciliation.
The completion of the integration with Visa has been fueled by the desire of banks to consolidate their entire card schemes on a single trusted and reliable platform with a view to reducing their costs to better serve their customers, improving service quality as well as creating access to Interswitch's Quick teller value added services platform for bill presentment/ payment, airtime top-up and real-time funds transfer.
Akeem Lawal, Managing Director, Interswitch Switching and Processing, said that with the integration agreement, Interswitch becomes the fi rst processor to deliver the complete service that fi nancial institutions have desired for some time – a robust, trusted and customer-centric platform that processes all cards. "That we are kicking off our Visa processing service with contracts from 4 major banks with 3 others in advanced stages of discussion is a clear indication of how the market sees this achievement," he said.
