Postilion, a global provider of payments software solutions and a division of S1 Corporation, reported that it its helping African banking and retail clients to update their technologies in the process of the continent wide migration from magnetic stripe cards to chip cards.

Today most of African institutions consider magnetic stripe card technology as obsolete. There were multiple cases of fraud committed through copying magnetic stripe cards. In South Africa alone credit card fraud stood for R420 million in 2008 which is a 146% increase as compared with the previous year. This spurred the African nations to shift to more reliable solutions.

At the moment Postilion provides its technology to 23 of the 24 banks in Nigeria and the central payments switch. It plays a key role in assisting the migration of card programs and acceptance infrastructure of these institutions to chip and PIN technology.

In South Africa three largest banks are partnering with Postilion. In order to comply with EMV card issuance banks have been upgrading their ATM estates with South Africa's major retailers also turning to Postilion to assist them in becoming EMV compliant.