Payment Clearing Houses
Payment Clearing House (PCH) means an arrangement between
two or more system participants governing the clearing
of payment instructions between such system participants.
Payment Clearing House agreements have been signed. For
the sake of efficient management of PCHs management committees
referred to as PCH Participant Groups have been created
to manage groupings of PCH agreements.
PCH Participants by Banks
STRATE (Including BESA)
The STRATE payment stream is responsible for clearing
and settling payments, resulting from equity (share market)
transactions between participating banks. The BESA payment
stream does the same for Bond Market transactions.
Code Line Clearing
The Code Line Clearing PCH is the Clearing House responsible for cheques cleared between banks using the Code Line Clearing System. This system enables banks to capture the information of a deposited cheque electronically by reading the magnetic code line and transmitting the information via the PCH System Operator to the paying bank for settlement before the paper cheque is delivered to the paying bank for final approval. The Code Line Clearing PCH operates under the PCH PG Paper.
Credit Card & Debit Card
The Credit Card products are in most instances linked
to one of the two major international card associations,
Visa and MasterCard, with American Express and Diners
Club also being represented. Fleet Card, Petrol and
Garage Card products bear domestic labels of the
individual banks and are not linked to central clearing
agencies. A Credit Card is essentially a payment
instrument through which purchases can be made utilising
credit provided by the issuing bank. A Debit Card
provides the same purchasing capability but purchases
are made from funds held by the customer at the bank.
A Credit Card purchase is mandated (approved) by
the customer through signature on the card slip,
whereas a debit card transaction is mandated through
a PIN keyed in by the customer. Garage and Petrol
cards are hybrid cards with special application for
paying car expenses. Debit Cards in South Africa
are cleared (exchanged) on a real time basis through
Payment System Operators and settled once a day in
batch.
Credit Card transactions are approved through the PCH
System Operators on a real time basis but clearing and
settlement happens in the largest number of cases in
a batch mode directly between the participating banks.
The Card types described above are all facilitated in
one Payment Clearing House Participant Group know as
the Card PCH PG.
EFT Credits & EFT Debits
The EFT Credit PCH facilitates the exchange of credit
payment instructions for amounts less than R 5 million
which are delivered on a batch basis to the interbank
PCH System Operator for sorting and onward delivering
to the receiving bank.
EFT Debits facilitate the
delivery of mandated debit requests limited to less
than R
500 000 from users of the collecting
bank to the paying bank via the interbank PCH System
Operator in a similar process to the credits.
Immediate Settlement & ZAPS
The Immediate Settlement Payment Stream is denoted
as the senior payment stream as more than 90% of
the value of payments flow through this stream on
a pre-funded real time basis. This payment stream
is aimed at higher value payments but credit payments
of any value may be made through it. ZAPS is a delayed
batch settled payment stream (for items below R5
million) cleared on a real time basis.
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