An ISO 20022 Fast Payments Testing Platform

In South Africa, the Rapid Payments Programme (RPP) journey began in 2018, leading to the successful launch of PayShap by the first cohort of banks in March 2023. How did BankservAfrica make this innovation possible? One contributing factor was their use of a new fast payments testing platform that simulates a bank to test against.

The Challenge

This modernisation drive is exciting, and ambitious for all stakeholders but requires significant investment from BankservAfrica. As the South African clearing house, BankservAfrica is responsible for providing the RPP (now known as PayShap) infrastructure for the programme participants - including real-time payment clearing, proxy management, and proxy resolution. This covers onboarding and certifying new participants through extensive testing processes. The use of a testing simulator for bank participants to test against was one way to alleviate the time required by BankservAfrica.

Any bank that wants to participate in the BankservAfrica PayShap network needs to implement BankservAfrica’s API to establish an integration with the PayShap switch. This requires that the participant performs a comprehensive set of certification and market acceptance testing before finally being added to the production network. Certification testing with a simulator helps to ensure that participants:

• Have implemented all relevant API operations appropriately;
• Adhere to the SLAs defined by the scheme rules (such as the scheme rules for a PayShap transaction that require all clearing transaction messages be processed completely from end to end within 10 seconds); 
• Can process all request and response messages correctly with the operator (both functionally and technically); and 
• Are applying the appropriate message layer authentication correctly.

The Solution

The RPP Testing Platform was designed and made available to enable participants to test their PayShap implementation without the need to connect to the BankservAfrica (the operator) switch itself. This - critically - streamlines the actual certification and acceptance procedure when adding new participants.

A testing platform is found to be useful to participants while they are still in the process of implementing an API integration. It acts as a sandbox to experiment and test transactions against, until they are ready for the formal certification testing process.

The RPP Testing Platform allows a participant to test their PayShap implementation against a variety of technical flows, either as a payer or as the payee. Ultimately - the platform simulates the National Payments System (NPS) environment where participants send messages via BankservAfrica. Participants can test at their own pace, and only once they are confident in their system, do they then require input from BankservAfrica.

Without the use of a simulator environment, the addition of new participants to BankservAfrica’s PayShap network is a tedious and slow process. This is due to the need for the participant to test transaction flows through the operator as well as through other participants (e.g., Bank A needs to connect to the operator and Bank B to test all transaction scenarios). 

The RPP Testing Platform creates a higher level of trust that the participant has correctly implemented due to simulated testing with industry partners. Overall, this streamlines the process by resulting in fewer issues that need to be addressed during Market Acceptance Testing (MAT).

The simulator is web-based, with participants being able to connect to the platform from their development environments via both the public and private cloud. The self-service design of the simulator means that it is easy for any participant to access the platform and test message flows - in real time and in the participant’s own time. A highly valuable feature of the RPP Testing Platform is that it offers a user interface for participants to monitor health checks, validate transactions, generate extracts, and initiate payee tests. 

This self-service functionality not only contributes to a great user experience for participants by offering a large sense of control over testing capability and monitoring. It also plays an important role in limiting the capacity needed by the operator when embarking on this sort of modernisation initiative. In this case, BankservAfrica does not have to manage each participant and participant testing requirements. In addition, the participants can access the dashboards and view transactions themselves, which are updated to reflect the test outcomes as they test. 

Built according to ISO 20022 standards, the RPP Testing Platform sets any participant up to support fast payments - a new offering when compared to existing card testing platforms with ISO 8583 standards. 

The RPP Testing Platform can be set up for an operator quickly, and customised with operator-specific branding. Low running costs make it easy and affordable to implement the simulator. Participants can be quickly onboarded and set up for their own testing - all factors which contribute to an operator being able to take new services to market as fast as possible, with confidence in the offering.

Ultimately, in this race to payments modernisation, this simulator allows clearing houses to scale new offerings quickly and makes the fast, reliable launch of new products possible.

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