Eftpos has finished building a centralised payments hub meant to speed up the rollout of products including Eftpos online and mobile payments.
The hub will replace a network of bilateral links between financial institutions and merchants which started when Eftpos cards were launched in Australia during the 1980s.
Eftpos has already completed millions of successful test transactions using the new hub, Eftpos CEO Bruce Mansfield said at the Customer Show in Melbourne.
Two of its 14 financial institution members are connected to the hub and will go live by September, with a third coming online soon afterward, Mansfield said. Remaining members will be connected in phases, he said.
Certification will begin this month, and all connections are to be completed by late 2015.
Eftpos announced the payment hub in October last year. The hub was built by payment technology vendor FIS.
“It comes down to ubiquity, agility, flexibility and innovation – the need to change quickly and respond to rapid developments in payments technology but still service the whole market,” Mansfield said at the Customer Show.
“A centralised hub makes it easier and faster to innovate and meet the needs of changing consumer expectations.”
Through the hub, products under trial including digital online and mobile payments will be able to be updated twice annually though scheduled software releases, he said.
The hub will also support Eftpos’s new chip and contactless product which members will begin to issue later this year, he said.
“And the Eftpos hub may be able to carry other transactions types for the industry that eftpos does not look after today,” he added.
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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