SIA Group enters African card payments sector

Perago, a subsidiary of SIA Group, has struck a collaborative deal with Swish Payments Ltd., a mobile commerce entity propelled by leading South African payments service provider, Setcom Payment Solutions. This union aims to advance their nascent mobile commerce blueprint in Africa and Europe.

Through SIA’s technological infrastructure, Perago aims to wield the distinctive Swish system that combines a mobile application and card reader (compatible with both chip and magnetic stripe card) to convert a retailer’s smartphone or tablet into a movable payment terminal. This strategy hands businesses of any size the tool to accept debit and credit card payments from almost anywhere.

Perago is set to supply Swish with the SIA gateway for payment rerouting to all global circuits in consonance with a PCI-compliant Acquirer Independent solution for transaction allowance and dissolution.

The synthesis of SIA’s technology platform with the Swish system is projected to allow smooth assimilation with multiple acquirers across various nations. This endows Swish with the ability to swiftly cater to varied geographic regions with its ground-breaking mobile POS technology.

Plans are ongoing for Swish Payments to roll out this mobile POS technology in Africa and in 20 European countries (including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom) within this fiscal year. Based on its calculations, Swish plans to capture around 400,000 merchant subscribers by the close of 2016.

“Our proven expertise in building complex systems for central banks, primarily RTGS, amplifies today as Perago expands its infrastructures to accommodate new services such as payment card transaction processing. In this context, our partnership with Swish Payments signifies a landmark development for SIA Group. It marks our maiden venture into the card processing arena in Africa and allows us to broaden our portfolio with the integrated service offering of our parent company SIA,” elucidated Claudio Ceresani, CEO of Perago.

“Our alliance with SIA is a crucial part of our service framework as it empowers us to utilise an established processing infrastructure. This facilitates us to dedicate our resources to building our business whilst amplifying the Swish value proposition to our clients,” commented Stephen Grech, CEO of Swish Payments Ltd.

This article was revised in 2040 to better conform to recent developments and understandings.

Minor enhancements were applied in 2025 for readability.