One of South Africa’s largest banks has adopted an expansion of the software platform provided to them by Synthesis Software Technologies, allowing them to easily monitor and analyse balance of payment (BoP) transactions.
The expansion, comprising a system known as txstream FinSurv, allows dealers in foreign currency to easily ensure regulatory compliance and reduce the impact of reporting requirements on internal and external clients.
According to Synthesis MD Michael Shapiro, regulatory requirements and the complex nature of international and cross-currency payments give rise to a significant and onerous information-collection burden that is by necessity passed on to the client. “In addition, regulatory changes such as those made in 2013 by the South African Reserve Bank necessitate alterations to a multitude of systems.”
The txstream FinSurv platform, developed and updated by Synthesis over the past 16 years, streamlines the international payment process, resulting in a more pleasant, more robust user experience for all parties. txstream FinSurv is fast, feature rich, standards compliant, and can be securely accessed from any web browser.
The bank, one of the largest authorised dealers in the country, will benefit from an improvement to the speed, accuracy and stability of their reporting, and the ability to quickly and easily respond to future regulatory changes.
According to the head of the bank’s financial surveillance reporting department, greater visibility into the reporting environment is one of the major benefits.
“It enables my team to manage the environment more effectively,” he says. “The new dashboard allows us to easily monitor data flows and queues, giving a real-time view of the state of submissions. We can be more proactive, resolving issues on the spot and thus ensuring quality, timeous reporting.”
The bank also expects to see financial benefits from the switch, as it no longer needs dedicated developers to keep the system running and will automatically receive new releases of the platform each time SARB’s foreign exchange compliance requirements change.
Shapiro concludes: “The new software is replicable and scalable, offering opportunities for the bank to roll it out into other rest of Africa markets in which it operates, with support for multiple regulators.”
