Teraco launches marketplace for financial institutions to connect directly to customers
As the innovation and application race in South Africa's financial sector continues, Teraco Data Environments has announced a new offering, FinVault, a secure data centre facility where institutions can connect easily and quickly to their customers, reducing costs, improving latency, and ultimately getting greater traction out of their online apps.
FinVault is a highly secure facility, which offers individually-caged suites as well as additional security surveillance for each suite if required. Biometric cabinets are optionally available and Teraco offers 24-hour, seven-days-per-week, 365-days-a-year support with remote access. Teraco Managing Director, Lex van Wyk, says Teraco is a vendor-neutral data centre providing guaranteed uninterrupted power and offering 99.999% uptime in client service level agreements as a standard. "This is vitally important in order to guarantee no loss in revenue due to downtime or a shortage of power."
In addition, peering services available through Teraco's NAPAfrica will bring customers closer to the community and enable them to distribute data swiftly. Teraco offers financial clients access to an industry ecosystem, giving them direct access to key institutions like the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with an achieved latency of 1ms.
Van Wyk says Teraco is a critical cog in the process of distributing online financial applications. "In most institutions, each branch accesses applications from centralised data centres. This means that transactions made are reflected immediately on the banks' servers and the customer can transact further from any of the banks' branches throughout the world. It is even broader than just online services, because of the proximity to almost all South Africa's Internet service providers (ISPs); banks and financial services institutions can now offer a multitude of offerings to their clients, including connectivity, VOIP, video and more, for a fraction of the expected interconnect price."
Colocation has seen an increase in popularity internationally as there is no capital expenditure and substantially reduced operation expenses. FinVault extends the option of colocation to the financial services industry with an eye on their stringent requirements. "FinVault effectively creates a community through peering, and by the proximity of financial providers to their customers in one place. Not only does this give banking institutions another advantage in terms of their retail offerings, but it also provides a number of interconnect possibilities and more cost-effective potential for online banking applications.
Farren Roper, Head of Connect ISP and Business Operations at FNB Connect, says peering is critical to electronic banking and to the ISP services that FNB Connect provides. "Having a vendor-neutral policy will be important to the strategy of financial institutions in South Africa in the cost-effective distribution of applications, which is fast becoming necessary for our customers, now and more so in the future."
"Overall, Finvault is a facility for the financial services market to easily connect to a carrier of choice and to exchange points, where clients can access their online environments at the highest quality," says Van Wyk. Van Wyk says Finvault customers will also have access to the many carriers, ISPs and other service providers already live in the data centre, which will support the sector further with their connectivity and infrastructural needs.
Built according to global best practice, FinVault is a highly secure colocation site, developed to safeguard critical financial data and establish solid business continuity plans for clients in the financial services arena.