Driven by regional central banks, Buna payment system enables participants to onboard safely in compliance with the global standards, smoothly via a clear and well-documented operational process, and time-efficiently thanks to the open standard technology used by the system that minimizes the efforts for participating banks.
Buna has developed a list of mandatory requirements that show Buna’s strong commitment to apply the highest compliance standards to protect the payment ecosystem and its participants.
Starting from the eligibility criteria, Buna requires the applicant to be a licensed, supervised, and regulated financial institution capable to exercise a strong level of compliance capabilities that confirm its adherence to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) regulations, anti-corruption requirements, and sanctions lists, and is proficient to detect and act on suspicious and on illegal activities.
As enrollment starts, Buna follows due-diligence procedures with every applicant entity by requesting and examining a complete set of supporting documents, such as the bank license, the composition of the board of directors, the Financial Crime Compliance policy, and related entity controls and processes.
On the contractual side, Buna protects the rights of its participants through its contractually binding documents, namely the Participation Agreement and the Rulebook (Rule and Procedures) that are governed by the English law. The rulebook outlines the legal, financial, and information security rights and obligations that ensure the stability of the payment system.
With the completion of the contractual stream, the Buna team launches the implementation phase and introduces the participant to the technical process to connect to Buna.
The process is well-documented and follows a step-by-step approach, starting with explaining the use cases and transaction flow scenarios, payment message types and formats, and then moving to explaining the system connectivity and information security requirements, training on operational aspects including currencies management, the portal, reporting tools, and users’ management.
Once the participant is fully equipped with the needed knowledge, they will implement the necessary system changes at the bank’s end to connect with Buna system, which usually takes a minimal time as Buna utilizes the SWIFT network that all banks are connected to and a message format that all banks are familiar with. Once the bank is ready to test, Buna launches the system integration testing process which is well-documented with detailed testing scenarios.
Once this step is completed successfully the bank performs a market rehearsal, which is an end-to-end testing in association with their correspondent banks to ensure that funding and defunding scenarios are also covered within the end-to-end testing.
If all is good Buna will complete the process by conducting a pre-production preparation session and a refresher training session for the participant to ensure that all is set for the go-live.
Reaching this stage (typically after 6- weeks on average) the participant is now ready for doing business with the Buna community in Arab and international currencies with a minimal effort and without necessarily building any specific customer experience or making front-end changes, as Buna service can be launched under the existing bank’s products names and branding.
