Payment Stakeholders Assure Banks’ Customers Of Improved Service During Sallah.
With the approach of Sallah, the Muslim festivity and the attendant huge financial transactions, the payment stakeholders have assured banks’ customers of a reduced error-free and an improved e-payment system for a memorable celebration.
Eid-el Kabir holds in August and huge cash withdrawal is expected for last minutes shopping all over the country and also during the two-day holiday.
This assurance came on the heels of frustration by customers who had experienced hectic time using Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), Point Of Sale (PoS) and other e-payment channels owing to the alarming transaction delays and failure rates on these platform during festivities.
The rate of transaction failure on the platforms inched up to 21 percent in 357,065 total volume within five minutes on the first day of the last Eid-el-Fitri festivity held in June owing to deluge of transactions, marring the celebration of the Muslim’s end of the Ramadan fasting.
However, the NIBSS having taken note of this, said it is working closely with all stakeholders to ensure platform efficiency during the forthcoming Sallah celebration.
The payment stakeholders who have continually met to review the process. said issues regarding e-payment transactions have always bordered on Timeout, Reversals, and Capacity enhancement; thus deliberations from one of the stakeholder meetings was to review the processes and introduce measures to ensure positive customer experience.
Some of the measures addressed were: Timeout, this is the total turnaround time, (TAT) for a PoS transaction cycle from the time it is received from a PoS to the time a response is sent back to the terminal; this TAT was initially configured at 15 seconds in agreement with banks and processors.
However, with the increasing reported delayed responses from Issuers after this timeout in recent times, could cause authorized debits not to return to the terminal before the set TAT, NIBSS with the banks, had all decided to adjust timeout to 20 seconds from 15 seconds. There was further adjustment of timeout to 45 seconds from 20 seconds and isolation of any bank with delayed responses beyond 45 seconds.
Concerning reversal which could be delayed by platform downtime, network issues at processor level and the nonavailability of the bank to receive the reversal when it is done by the NIBSS, other remedial measures taken are fixing of platform application issues, Network remediation carried out with concerned Processor and the implementation of a secondary process whereby all reversals for any business day are re-transmitted between 10pm and 12 mid-night to return credit to cardholders through their banks/Processors.
In addition to these are implementation of real-time reversal by POS terminals directly which require that banks are available to receive such online real-time.
On capacity enhancement, the Policy stipulates that system resources must be enhanced once the 65% threshold is reached and the industry will continue to implement that. Also Infrastructure has been scaled up such that the system utilization is lower than 40% to prepare for expected higher volumes in the next few years.
Stakeholders in the payments space had also agreed on implementation of an in-memory database system on the NCS platform to ensure super-fast responses at the center for which all systems have been load-balanced for non-stop performance.
While processors have been advised to ensure redundancy of their network links for efficient fail-over whenever there is a service failure by any network provider as well as to scale up on infrastructure, banks also have been advised on the minimum system requirements for their front-end systems in order for them also to cope with higher volumes.
The intervention of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in the infrastructure matter with active engagements of stakeholders and timelines to achieve same is expected to push all service providers to scale up on infrastructure because the strength of the ecosystem will always be equal to the weakest one.
While NIBSS will monitor the system to quickly intervene in the event of increasing transaction failures, as announced by the then Ag. MD/CEO of NIBSS, Mr. Niyi Ajao, in addition to the transaction monitoring platform for confirmation of transaction status, Banks and stakeholders had been provided with real time Monitoring Solution called Tra
F as-a-service for proactive monitoring of their transaction status, failure rate, stakeholder availability and average processing time, he said.
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