With a new partnership, an upstart mobile payments service is hoping to revolutionize financial inclusion in South Africa. MobiCash, together with mobile payments network specialist Boloro, has teamed up with Big Save Group to enable mPayments for tens of thousands of merchants.
Big Save Group is a major wholesaler servicing a large chunk of South Africa’s ‘spaza’ shops – small businesses that are often run out of individuals’ homes. Such businesses can struggle with financial integration, but MobiCash’s aim is to allow them to enable cashless mPayments for those spaza shops and other businesses working with Big Save Group.
The announcement coincided with the World Economic Forum on Africa, at which a major theme is “Connecting Africa’s Resources through Digital Transformation”. Announcing the partnership, MobiCash Chairman Patrick Ngabonziza said, “We are proud to collaborate with our partners to bring a holistic ecosystem that not only has the potential to boost small business but also has the potential to impact entire communities as we have seen in our home country Rwanda.”
There will be some technical challenges, of course. MobiCash uses NFC technology, and it isn’t clear how many spaza shops feature NFC readers, or can readily adopt them. It also isn’t clear how many South Africans patronizing spaza shops possess smartphones equipped with the fingerprint scanners that can be used for MobiCash authentication; fortunately, the mPayment system can also authenticate via voice biometrics, which should go some way to empowering spaza shop customers to start making mPayments.
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