How Ecentric Drives In Person Payments

Ecentric, an omnichannel payments provider,  has announced significant enhancements to its In Person Payments platform in order to improve performance and reliability, and meet customer requirements around reporting and analytics, as well as drive growth within the company as it extends its offering to Tier 2 retailers in the local market.

“Ecentric is committed to continuously innovating the In Person Payments platform to maintain our leadership in the industry and meet evolving customer needs. Moving forward, we plan to build on the foundation of our recent improvements by leveraging the scalability and flexibility of our Cloud architecture. This will enable us to introduce new features and services more rapidly while maintaining the highest standards of security and performance,” says Gary Bowers, product manager at Ecentric.

Ecentric processes a fifth of all card payments in South Africa and is a trusted partner to two thirds of JSE-listed retailers, serving their in-store, online, mobile and omnichannel payment requirements.

According to Bowers, the company found that being able to provide a variety of ways to integrate demands significant enhancements to its Platform:

“Prior to the acquisition of Thumbzup, it was challenging for us to focus on stability, scalability and efficiency.

However, Ecentric’s aim is always to provide a reliable service to its merchants, thus the team set out to deliver exactly that post acquisition.

The technologies that the teams have implemented allow for a flexible and sturdy platform which supports a modular approach to certain merchant requirements,” says Bowers.

In 2023, Ecentric acquired the IP, people, and customers of innovative technology payment solutions company Thumbzup, to make a significant play into the broader retail sector, and reach more national retailers in the tier two retail sector, while being a trusted partner to service providers supporting SMMEs.

Greater precision and speed

With the solution now offered across all acquiring banks in South Africa, improvements carried out on the platform include an upgraded caching service to improve overall system performance; a database re-architecture and optimisation to increase transaction processing speed and reliability; implementing real-time data streaming for more robust reporting and analytics; introducing real-time notifications and seamless integration with external systems; and new features that provide enhanced payment security and flexibility, such as card-not-present refunds and card-present tokenization.

“We will continue to integrate cutting-edge technologies, such as enhancing our use of real-time data analytics powered by Kafka streaming, to deliver even more insightful reporting and predictive capabilities. This will allow our customers to make data-driven decisions with greater precision and speed,” says Bowers.

The ongoing upgrades to the technology stack, including the latest versions of development frameworks and tools, will ensure that Ecentric’s platform remains compatible with the latest industry standards and customer requirements, Bowers says.

The company is also exploring opportunities to further enhance its integration capabilities, making it easier for customers to connect with external systems and services through improved APIs and webhook functionalities.

He adds that payments, specifically integrated payments, have matured extensively the last few years, and Payments Service Providers have eagerly sought to provide their merchants an easy means to enable Card Present processing. Feedback from merchants has mostly been that the overhead from scheme mandates are typically extensive, and one of the company’s goals is to obfuscate those complications as much as possible.

“We will incorporate how customer insights have driven innovations that support both the platform’s growth and Ecentric’s market leadership. Our focus will remain on providing seamless, secure, and scalable solutions that drive growth for our customers and keep Ecentric at the forefront of innovation in the payments industry,” says Bowers.