National Australia Bank are looking to grow its merchant acquiring business through improved speed to market of new services.
National Australia Bank are looking to grow market share in retail payments but encumbered by legacy systems, processes and thinking. They identified a path to growth through responding to a growing body of merchant clients that wanted value add services and better responsiveness. This however could not be delivered effectively by their existing systems. National Australia Bank identified Distra as the most suitable technology partner to satisfy these emerging requirements.
Key deliverables were identified as adaptability, visibility, real time reporting, scalability, shortest time to market and lowest transaction cost.
The ability to provide a merchant acquiring channel that can rapidly on-board new merchant clients; adapt quickly to new requirements; provide a new range of contemporary payment services; and still be cost effective when compared to the established, high volume legacy business – requires flexibility, agility and scalability.
Features provided by the Distra EFT Switch:
- Exploiting the efficient but highly reliable Distra MCAS platform, the solution was hosted on a modest IBM hardware configuration (entry level Linux BladeCenter) which allowed a low cost entry point for the initiative but scope for plenty of growth in volume.
- Distra's EFT Frameworks for rapid Endpoint and Transaction Session build and Distra STING for automated testing allowed new merchant channels to be on-boarded well inside traditional timelines.
- Distra's already extensive component library, its contemporary XML definition model, and access to a rich vein of real time transaction and operational data, allows for new functionality and innovative value add services to be rapidly deployed.
- Distra's truly open standards based approach allowed for simple and rapid integration with existing and new bank systems.
Bringing new business online faster and cheaper than competing institutions, together with a range of new value-add services, offers National Australia Bank a significant advantage in growing market share. Bank's payment services clients, particularly merchants and other corporates, are beginning to demand increasingly competitive but, at the same time, improved service levels. As new, non-traditional, payments players enter the market, the need to respond to these new service levels can only increase.
National Australia Bank has been successful in winning new business on a new platform that will grow with it. Distra’s system exceeded National Australia Bank's performance requirements - "four times the processing throughput at 1/10th cost of legacy system".