Ecentric Launches POSPay to Enable Branded Payment Services for Till Vendors in South Africa

Ecentric  has announced the launch of POSPay, a semi-white-label payment enablement solution that allows South Africa’s till vendors to offer payment services under their own brand. Through POSPay, till vendors integrate once into Ecentric’s certified acquiring and processing infrastructure and then offer their entire merchant base a fully integrated card payment solution. It is branded under the vendor’s own name, runs on a certified terminal and connects to multiple acquiring banks through a single back-end relationship with Ecentric.

The product process is simple. A till vendor joins the POSPay programme after passing Ecentric’s vetting process, which assesses financial capability, technical maturity, merchant base size and sales capacity. The till vendor signs a commercial agreement with Ecentric, which holds the established host-to-host relationships with participating acquiring banks. Merchant verification and approval remain the responsibility of the acquiring bank, as required under South African financial regulation. Ecentric provides the processing infrastructure, certified terminal solutions, reporting and second-level support behind the scenes. The till vendor goes to market under their own payment brand with their logo on the device and name on the service.

Fees are set by the till vendors to merchants above the baseline fees passed down by Ecentric and they earn commission from select acquiring banks for each merchant they bring onto the programme. For the first time, the payment layer belongs to the Till vendor.

What changes for the merchant?

South Africa’s independent mid-tier merchant has long been subject to the competing priorities of payment providers. Switching acquiring banks has meant replacing terminals and renegotiating integrations, which has invariably disrupted operations. It has not been possible for merchants to be bank agnostic, a reasonable expectation for any business, if they are below the top commercial tier.

POSPay changes this by allowing merchants to switch acquiring banks without changing their till software or disrupting their payment integration. Where the till vendor sources and provides the hardware, merchants can move between acquirers with minimal disruption and the underlying bank relationship, and merchant IDs are updated in the backend while the user experience remains unchanged. In scenarios where the acquiring bank provides the terminal directly, switching acquirers is a more involved process.

What changes for the bank?

Leading financial institutions face structural tension in the mid-tier merchant market. Their acquiring divisions have ambitious revenue targets, but sales and merchant services teams can’t reach independent merchants at the scale required to achieve those targets. Direct-to-market fintech models have taken a percentage of market share while internal direct-to-merchant programmes have had mixed results.

Ecentric brings a portfolio of vetted and technically capable POS vendors, each carrying a significant number of merchants, into a single programme that plugs directly into the bank’s acquiring infrastructure. Each till vendor becomes a trusted distribution channel, giving banks a faster route to market in the mid-tier merchant segment than building direct-to-vendor programmes internally. Ecentric’s established host-to-host connections with acquiring banks mean the technical integration is already in place and banks benefit from the speed without bearing the cost of building and maintaining channel relationships themselves.

Built on trust

Ecentric has been in advanced engagement with till vendors for two years before bringing POSPay to market. The programme is deliberately selective to ensure the network is trusted by banks on the other side of the arrangement.

The technology infrastructure across processing, certification and reporting, is Ecentric’s existing capability, extended into a new commercial model. What POSPay adds is the relationship architecture across agreements, channel marketing, campaign templates and content designed to support till vendors activate their merchant base.

Key insights:

• 15 till vendors engaged with Ecentric at the time of release.
• 4 banks acquiring relationships in place or in progress at launch.
• 1 integration as till vendors move from managing multiple payment provider relationships to a single POSPay integration.
• 2 years Ecentric development time spent developing and validating POSPay within the market before launch.
  In their own words:

“The banks can’t do much without an integrated till vendor, and the till vendors need a payment partner they can trust not to compete with them. POSPay was built to keep those two connected with Ecentric providing the technology, the processing infrastructure, the commercial architecture and the distribution agency work.”

– Don Lange, Partner Manager, Ecentric Payment Systems