Banking enabler Direct Transact achieves seamless migration to Teraco data centre for 15 major financial institutions, ensuring no downtime or disruptions in the SA payments system and that the financial ecosystem gains a major boost in scalability, reliability and global competitiveness.  

18 August 2022, Pretoria – Fifteen major South African financial institutions have successfully migrated all their sensitive business data and hosted systems to Teraco, Africa’s leader in data centre infrastructure. The migration was coordinated in a single move described as a major technical feat and a step forward for the SA financial ecosystem.  

A major data migration for the financial sector 

The move involved ten of South Africa’s small- to medium-sized banks and five other major financial institutions. Six of these institutions are within the top 15 banking institutions in the country. All 15 institutions are customers of Direct Transact, South Africa’s largest outsourced banking and payments service provider.  

A total of 100 terabytes of sensitive data were migrated seamlessly and securely. “The new Direct Transact hybrid infrastructure at the state-of-the-art Teraco facility allows for the best of both cloud and hosted servers to ensure minimal latency between hosts, full redundancy, maximum scalability and security. The move to Teraco was a delicate but important operation - even a few seconds of downtime could have been very disruptive for the South African banking and payments ecosystem, but we pulled it off without a single hitch, in a move that is ultimately to the benefit of the entire financial ecosystem of the country,” says Dirk Labuschagne, Executive Head of Business Support Services at Direct Transact.  

Direct Transact’s systems enable R40-billion worth of transaction flows through the local banking and payments system every month. Its systems ensure that payment flows between different sectors of the banking and payments ecosystem work in harmony.  

Labuschagne, who had a broken arm at the time, says he is extremely proud of his dedicated team for ensuring the migration took place with precision. “Our team members overcame all kinds of adversity to make this happen. We really have exceptionally skilled and dedicated people making sure that our clients and the broader financial system always remain safe and stable.”  

It was, however, a matter of meticulous preparation. The move was the final phase of a project that had been in development for three years, protecting Direct Transact’s track record of 99,99% uptime for its clients over the past 20 years.  

The 15 institutions, together making up 70% of SA’s banks that participate directly in the national payment system, previously had their core banking, processing, switching, card transaction and account verification data hosted by Direct Transact in a hybrid environment, in line with its clients’ specific needs. 

Teraco welcomes Direct Transact’s customers 

“We welcome Direct Transact to Teraco, the central point of interconnection between carriers, clouds, content and application service providers on the continent,” says Ryan Proksch, Head of Enterprise at Teraco.  

“By deploying critical infrastructure in Teraco, Direct Transact and its partners now have direct access to a financial ecosystem comprising more than 250 network and connectivity providers, all the local and global cloud onramps, and over 80 financial services providers. As the recognised African leader in data centre infrastructure, Teraco provides world class infrastructure facilities as well as access to a business enablement platform assisting enterprises in their digital migration strategies," says Proksch. 

Labuschagne says the move to Teraco’s hyper-connected, highly resilient and secure colocation facilities is beneficial for the local banking ecosystem. “Teraco provides the ultimate protection against loadshedding, connectivity challenges, natural disasters, and it allows for vastly increased stability, availability and scalability of the system. Teraco houses the critical infrastructure of eight out of the world’s ten biggest internet companies, as well as Africa’s largest internet peering exchange, NAPAfrica. It means our banking platforms will be able to handle accelerated growth by being scalable on all levels. This is good for the financial system’s growth and expansion potential, ultimately making our financial system more globally competitive and robust,” says Labuschagne.