I’ve been thinking a lot lately about systems taken for granted because they’ve always been there and they’ve always worked.
By Martin Grunewald, executive head: payments business at BankservAfrica
Take the load shedding that we experienced in the first months of 2019 as an example. We’ve become so used to having electricity that when the supply suddenly went down, we faced huge disruption. Traffic came to a standstill and routines as simple as making a cup of coffee in the morning became a challenge. I can only imagine what could be if this worsened to the threat of a national electricity blackout.
So how, as a national infrastructure provider, do you ensure an ‘always-on’ status? Let’s look at payments as an example. For many years the South African payments landscape has been regarded as one of the best in the world. Much of this success can be accredited to stability. BankservAfrica has contributed to this stability for 47 years with an interbank payments system that never stops breathing.
Keeping a system alive, and here I mean really alive and not just barely breathing, involves two elements: stability and innovation. Stability and innovation seem like contradictory characteristics. Innovation implies a measure of risk, stability implies risk-avoidance. I want to suggest that finding the sweet spot where innovation and stability meet is the key to a healthy ‘always-on’ status.
Stability drives innovation and innovation improves stability
Since we’re not in the business of launching new products to the market as a typical innovative company might, we leverage our stability to find ways of innovating within our space. We ask ourselves how we can innovate for speed, security, efficiency, and enhance stability even more. And then we do it. It’s a mutual symbiosis. In other words, stability creates room for innovation, experimentation and maintenance of systems and in turn innovation, experimentation and maintenance improves stability.
Stability in the midst of change
Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said “change is the only constant in life”. Never has this been truer than it is now. As the payments industry starts gearing up for the imminent world of ‘instant everything’, IoT and the payments system of the future, things are going to move along quickly which can introduce new risks and challenges. Having stability in the midst of all this change means being able to do what we do really well while effectively planning and preparing for the evolutionary transformation that’s coming.
Even within the structure of our business we have created this focus. On one side we have dedicated teams of people who focus only on the stability of our current environment. On the other side we have a team of people focusing on innovation and the future. Our experience with this is that the leadership plays an important role in creating the symbiosis between stability and innovation while making sure everyone’s eyes are always on our north star.
In our 47 years of processing we have collected some interesting data and touched many lives of people who don’t even know we exist. Keep an eye out for more on these.