The Foschini Group consists of 13 trading divisions dealing in lifestyle products ranging from fashion, jewelry, accessories, and cosmetics, to outdoor apparel, sporting equipment, and homeware. The Group trades in over 1,200 stores with more than 5,500 points of sale, making it South Africa's foremost specialty retailer. Their trading brands include Foschini, donna-claire, Fashion Express, Luella, Markham, Exact!, Sportscene, TotalSports, DueSouth, AmericanSwiss, Sterns, Matrix, and @home.

The Group needed a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective retail payments platform that could be integrated with their Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) terminals and provide value-added service capability. Such a solution would ideally support their business objectives of operational excellence, cost reduction, and profitable growth. This payments solution also had to meet the requirements for an EMV-compliant card payments system, as well as the criteria laid out by the PCI DSS standard. eCentric Switch proposed the active/active, high-availability Postilion solution for retailers, to which The Foschini Group agreed.

The Postilion architecture deployed for The Foschini Group aims to achieve as close to 100% uptime as possible, ensuring that any single point of failure in the system would have minimal impact on the Group's customers at the checkout points.

"More and more of our customers use cards as their payments instrument of choice. Thanks to the Postilion implementation, The Group is now able to offer faster and more accurate service at the checkout. Our store staff is very impressed with the ease of use and speed of the new system, and our finance department is able to reconcile transactions faster, which provides us with important financial benefits. Additional value-added services can also be made relatively seamlessly, supporting our future growth plans," says Brent Curry, Director, The Foschini Group I.T Director.

"The Foschini Group's management has expressed their delight with how exceptionally well the teams from The Group, eCentric Switch, and Postilion have worked together to implement this project. There is great satisfaction with how successfully the implementation has been rolled out in such a short span of time," comments Rob de Vries, Director, eCentric Switch.

"We are pleased to have worked closely with eCentric Switch in taking one of South Africa's foremost retailers live on Postilion. Postilion has assisted with Foschini's compliancy needs, while ensuring they have a payments environment that can maximize uptime for the Group's various trading divisions," commented Deon van Biljon, SVP and General Manager, Postilion Africa.