On this blog, we recently told you about who Interswitch is, their rebrand, and what they have brought into the East African digital payments’ space; specifically Kenya and Uganda.
In a meet up with Justin Larby, Product Manager at Interswitch East Africa, we were exposed to some benefits of using their products over other products currently being offered in the market.
Some of the benefits of using Interswitch are:
By using them, you are basically ‘backing’ an African-built brand. Interswitch in itself describes itself as an Africa-focused brand started in West Africa and has been in operation for the past 13 years (started in 2002) and it facilitates the electronic circulation of money between individuals and organizations.
Interswitch is cloud ready. What this means is that the company has moved a lot of their operation to the cloud and therefore changed the payments space. How? Well, Interswitch is essentially running most of its instances on the cloud where its services are available anywhere and anytime using both mobile devices as well as wearable devices. Interswitch allows a user to access anything they’re running as long as they have an internet connection eliminating the need to have office infrastructure like ERP and Point of Sale tally solutions that may be expensive to implement and maintain.
Interswitch has a wide reach and great potential – Having served the West African market with over 20 Million Verve cards to date, Interswitch has a very promising future in the East African payments space and is well positioned to be quite competitive against brands like MasterCard and VISA. How? One way they’re doing this is by implementing well-defined security measures on the cards they issue Verve cards. This means you cannot lose your hard earned money due to fraudulent transactions on a card say due to skimming. What they’re also working on at the moment is a way to allow 2-Factor Authentication on card transactions. Say someone who buys an item online. As it is now, all a malicious fraudster needs in your card number and your CVV (3-digit number at the back of your credit/debit card) and that person can effect a transaction. Interswitch is working on a way that will require something else to authenticate a transaction e.g. an SMS code sent to the mobile number of the person the card is registered to or an email message sent to a personal email address with a code that one has to input. This will make it hard to bypass security measured put in place keeping the consumer/card holder’s money safe.
Interswitch has been Tried, Tested, and Certified – Did You Know that Interswitch powers all bank related transaction from your bank to MPESA, and vice versa except for Equity Bank payments? Yes, that applies to most of the transactions from Banks and Saccos (Savings and Credit Cooperatives) on this list.
Well, what more would one need to be sure that Interswitch is the way to go?
