Payment Platform

Tailored to be the leading African payments platform
Serves any African and International customer
processing payments in Africa

Fully serviced cloud-based, proven, flexible, PCI DSS compliant, multi-tenant payments gateway with the capability to:

Integrate to any payment's processor, including card processor, Mobile Money processors, Banks, acquirers and other financial groups

Processes (250 transactions per second / certified) any payment method and currency, existing technical integrations to over 100 payment methods in over 50 countries

Collects funds from any source and disburses to any source

Monitors, records and reports multi source payment/banking activities

Calculates tax

Monitors fraud

Cross Switch’s platform has processed payments for leading digital merchants in:

Markets

Emerging Markets

Source Code

Comprehensive Payment Solution

Cross Switch software service is a comprehensive payments solution that allows several different ways to integrate and add payment services to an existing web site or shopping cart

Supports both online and mobile web customers

Offers localization of payment forms and error messages into the customer’s preferred language

Backend payments engine is highly scalable. Well tested in many years of production use both in proprietary hardware deployments and cloud deployments

consists of 3 user-interface oriented components and 5 backend Java services

User-interface components comprise the paywall, the admin tool and the tax adapter

Backend services are written in Java and utilize the Spring Framework

Backend Java services are the REST API (aka the platform), the gateway service, the callback proxy service, the notification service, the mail relay service and the Smart FX Trading Service

3 User-interface oriented components

Admin Tool

Provides a UI to facilitate platform configuration and merchant and consumer support processes.

Tax Adapter

Provides a merchant specific pluggable microservice to compute sales tax and other fees associated with consumer purchases.

Paywall

Provides merchants with a simplified web integration to a consumer paywall. Provides optimized payment flows for synchronous and asynchronous payment methods

Services

Our Backend components

Platform REST API

1. Main component which serves as a frontend to all the other backend components

2. Primarily responsible for purchase flow

3. Handles the optional internal and external fraud checks. Calls the other services to complete the purchase and optionally notify both the merchant and the customer

4. Handles intelligent routing (split traffic, failover, BIN-based routing).

5. These APIs are used by the admin tool to control what methods are exposed on the paywall

6. APIs for configuring the gateways and payment methods

7. APIs for searching and displaying purchase history which are also exposed in the admin tool

8. Latest version of the Platform uses Spring

9. Framework 5.1.1, Java 8 and MySQL 5.7. The Spring Framework uses a number of open-source libraries.

10. Platform Service uses NO proprietary, non-open-source libraries

Gateway Service

1. Contains all of the code specific to each technical integration with a payment service provider (PSP) in a given country

2. Provides a standardized API for completing a purchase with each PSP

3. Also provides APIs for the dynamic discovery of the capabilities of each payment method in each country

4. Allows the paywall to adapt the payment forms for each method and country and needed to collect required information

5. Also uses Spring Framework 5.1.1, Java 8 and MySQL 5.7

Callback Proxy Service

1. Handles all callbacks from PSPs and routes them to the correct gateway deployment

2. Sub-merchant might have their own merchant identifiers (MIDs) with the PSP, this component handles routing purchase notifications to the correct cluster of merchant specific components

3. Also serves as a global repository for certain system-wide configuration information

4. Also uses Spring Framework 5.1.1, Java 8 and MySQL 5.7

Notification Service

1. Global service which works across many merchants and countries

2. Handles purchase notifications back to the merchant

3. Notifications can be optionally sent to multiple handlers in a merchant’s infrastructure

4. Can be retried many times as needed over several days to ensure they are successfully processed by the merchant systems

6. Notification service uses Spring Framework 3.2, Java 8 and MySQL 5.7

Mail Relay Service

1. Global service which works across many merchants and countries

2. Used to optionally send emails to the end-user customer.

3. Emails can include purchase receipts or additional instructions for completing a purchase

4. Component has a library of language localized email templates which can be used. 5. Uses Spring Framework 3.2, Java 8 and MySQL 5.7

Smart FX - Trading Service

1. Smart FX utilizes rules-based trading to automatically place and complete FX trades to minimize currency exposure while generating appropriate alerts and reports

2. Adds intelligence or rules to FX trading to maximize value by converting from local currency to a stable currency

3. Batches or groups trades into larger sums and then makes a single FX trade to satisfy multiple charges based on rules

4. Trades are grouped according to merchant, currency symbol (e.g. INR/USD), and bank (e.g. CITI)

5. Automatic FX trades helps to minimize currency risk exposure for volatile currencies

6. Global service which works across many merchants and countries

Smart FX – Intelligent routing

1. Bypasses congestion and outages process as many charges as possible if a transient failure occurs

2. Traffic management Share traffic between PSPs, matching by preferred PSP

3. Optimise Performance Increase conversion rate by maximum uptime

Smart FX - Rules for fx trading

1. Trade all currency X minutes after open

2. Trade all currency X minutes before close

3. Open and close trading rules are to minimize currency exposure overnight and to clear any accumulated FX trading from overnight charges

4. Trade when a X local currency units are available

5. Currency limit rule forces a trade when a large volume of a local currency is being held

6. Rules are configured on a country and bank

7. Notifications sent out to keep interested parties informed of the FX activity as fx trades are submitted and completed

8. When trades are submitted and filled - Treasury is notified of the FX activity

9. On trade completion, the bank and finance receive reports detailing the transactions affected by the FX trading to facilitate remittance

Smart FX –Settlement

1. Allows for the tenor (settlement time) to be configured by the merchant.

2. Default configuration is spot trading which settles in 2 days.

3. Also supports same day trade settlement (ON/OverNight)

4. PSPs have varying settlement terms. Smart FX supports this by allowing trades on transactions to be delayed by a specified time unit - allows time for funds to be transferred from the PSP bank account into the FX account. After which an FX trade can be executed based on rules .

Smart FX - Rules available

Smart FX - User Interface

1. Smart FX system has a user interface to configure the FX system

2. UI has user-based authentication and allows configuration of banks by country, user administration and viewing of completed FX trades and transactions affected by FX trades

3. Bank configuration involves configuring holidays, open/close hours, time zone, and Smart FX rules.

4. UI also allows manual FX trades to be entered. On occasion it may be necessary for Finance or the Treasury to enter manual trade to account for irregularities