Or, really how a payment should be.
| feature | Bank of Khartoum | EBS |
|---|---|---|
| Instant Payment settlement | Natively supported. Default settings, too | Supported from EBS, but requires coordination between EBS, the payment processor, and the settlement bank. |
| Purchase limitations | Purchase is managed through P2P in bankak. Limitations varies between 1M to 5 M. Some merchants have higher limits | This is the funny bit with ebs and their weird business logic: purchase is not strictly limited under the merchant’s end! Purchase is limited on the card holder and the card itself. The maximum amount per day is $100K per transaction and $500K maximum amount per day. This applies to all cards (whether bank’s atm cards, or ebs wallet cards) |
| Loan applications | Bank of Khartoum doesn’t offer loan applications via their app | None of EBS providers are offering loan applications (we had that experiment in Cashq, but we didn’t go live with it.) |
The first two features are extremely very important: people want to have their money in their accounts ASAP, and due to the inflation, the current ceiling of 500K Sudanese pound is strictly limiting to a huge market of money transfer in Sudan.
instant payment workarounds
Instant settlement is essentially this: the money gets settled to the merchant accounts the second the transaction is completed. Usually, merchant transactions don’t happen that way:
- the settlement process takes a few days, sometimes even more
- there is a process of money-laundry, fraudelent transactions and so in place for every transaction
- there is a serious and legitimate risk for both the payment network and the merchant in every transaction: imagin purchasing an item from US, and you are in Sudan. So, i made the payment, confirmed it and the merchant from their side completed the order (they actually sent the order in a cargo from US to Sudan.):
- for the payment processor there is a cost to pay for doing the settlement: from Bank of Khartoum in Sudan, to let’s say a partner bank in Dubai, then a partner bank in Europe all the way to the merchant’s bank in said US bank! Every hop we take from one bank to another has its owned fees. And that can add up pretty quickly.
- so, in cases, where a card holder flag a certain transaction as being fraud, the merchant might get in the risk of not getting paid AFTER sending the order. While, the payment processor must also pay the fees it occured during the transaction AS WELL AS also paying the merchant’s the amount in case the fraud happened in other place, and not just the merchant. A real risk for everyone – unlike Sudan, where merchants demand an instance settlement for every transaction that happens.