Institutions can connect directly to customers through FinVault

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 is a vendor neutral data centre providing guaranteed uninterrupted power and offering 99.9% uptime in client service level agreements as a standard. This is vitally important in order to guarantee no loss in revenue due to down time 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.

Broader than online services

Teraco managing director, Lex van Wyk says that Teraco is a critical cog in the process of distributing online financial applications. "In most institutions, each branch access 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."

Co-location has seen an increase in popularity internationally as there is no capital expenditure and substantially reduced operation expenses. FinVault extends the option of co-location 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 offering, but it also provides a number of interconnect possibilities and more cost effective potential for online banking applications.

Peering is critical

Farren Roper, head of Connect ISP and Business Operations at FNB Connect says that peering is critical to electronic banking and to the ISP services which FNB Connect provides. "Having a vendor neutral policy will be important to the strategy of financial institutions in South Africa in cost effectively 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. 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.