Gemalto, an international digital security company, announced today that NetOne is deploying a Gemalto mobile money transfer solution called LinqUs for the OneWallet service.
The OneWallet service was launched by NetOne to stakeholders in January this year becoming the second mobile money transfer service in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s second largest mobile operator, Telecel, launched the first mobile wallet service in December last year.
The OneWallet solution promises to make remittances within the country more convenient by allowing seamless local peer to peer money transfers. It also allows subscribers to pay bills and top up airtime on their mobile phones.
According to the release, Gemalto has developed the solution to enable NetOne subscribers to have their salaries paid directly onto their phones. This is expected to improve access to financial services by the unbanked population in Zimbabwe. The OneWallet service will also be used to pay government pensions in an effort to reduce the need for subscribers receiving government pensions to travel long distances to collect pension payments.
On why NetOne chose the Gemalto solution NetOne Managing Director, Mr. Reward Kangai, is quoted: Gemalto’s ability to offer an end-to-end solution, coupled with their extensive software expertise, made it an easy choice for NetOne. Mobile Money Transfer rollouts are long projects so we need a well established, trusted and future-proof technology partner to accompany us – Gemalto is exactly that.
The NetOne OneWallet service will be presented at Gemalto Mobile Money event being held in Ghana from today to the 17th of March.
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17 comments
We are a nation that embraces third party services and off shore web-hosts what can I say!
Its a global market (something a lot of Zimbabwe and its leaders seems to forget most of the time), the cost and time to develop in Zimbabwe is too great for customers like Netone to wait and hope the solution turns out ok.
Zim developers need funding and a professional business approach to have products and solutions ready for sale, then market them all round the world.
Hosting is a different story as that has real benefits to being run in Zimbabwe, but again it comes down to having enough money to provide a equal level of service.
This is starting to get embarrassing. What are all the Zim IT Graduates doing? A lot of these innovations that are taking the world by storm are started by pre-adolescent ‘children’ in their parents houses off of their high-western school education. Surely guys!
@Tafmak3000 have you forgotten that just until a year ago, at least up to 2009, highly skilled Zimbabwean personnel were on a mass exodus into the diaspora. It’s the after effects of those that made us this way. Have you forgotten that our Educational system, even up to University level has deteriorated. Have you forgotten that in 2008 everyone was scrambling to to just about anything to make sure that his belly was fed for that day? in that time who cared about sitting in garages, writing code, or being innovative when survival was more critical.
Of course we have IT graduates, but they lack experience and the guidance of industry exoerts who have since left the country.
Another important thing to remember is (unfortunately) Software development is incredibly reliant on sales and support. Developers can produce an amazing product but without a lot of support and money they will never be able to produce world class solutions as they will never make the sales to get the business self sufficient.
These companies you mention that take the world by storm are not done by children in the basement they are done by university students (ms, google, facebook etc) who received massives sums of investment and venture capatalism money to get their great idea out the masses and become the powerhouse they are now.
It is not feasible to expect NetOne to approach local developers to write this sort of thing from scratch, they need a proven (and probably certified) solution, else they stand the risk of losing a lot of time and money. It is also not feasible for a local developer to have a solution like this already written and waiting as it would take them a long time to develop on the hope they find customers down the line, if they have a great idea to write something like this they need funding and unfortuantely that is just not available to most developers in Zimbabwe. There are very few Zim development companies with a big enough product base to take a risk on developing new software without preexisting guaranteed clients who are prepared to wait till it is done.
ngth I totally agree with you. People seem to think that creating software is an easy thing. It’s not! To develop any worthwhile software takes years which requires investment. At present Zimbabwe does not have serious venture capitalists or investment bankers willing to commit to a lengthy software project.
Guys blaming economic woes , and stopping your good brains to think about tech innovations, its like blaming yo tummy after it lets s#4@t on your pants.Kenya has become the hub of ICT.We can do the same……Nokia,Samsung have setup Ict offices there. We can do it
Gizmbo, yes Zim can be a hub and produce quality products, that is what I am saying, but to achieve that we need large well funded development house (like ones backed by Nokia and Samsung). A one man band developer does not have the time and resources to write, market and support a world class product. And companies like Netone cannot afford to wait around and fund someone to possibly provide a product as good as one that is available now and already been tested and the bugs ironed out.
For Zim to become a tech hub in Africa its development companies need to grow and be well funded enough at least in the starting years till they have a large enough client base to be self sufficient. Continuously having to develop for clients is not a business model that will lead to large companies, that is achieved by resale of already completed programs, but to get to that stage takes time and money, not to mention good marketing and support. Some large software developers have substantially bigger marketing budgets than they do development budgets (its crazy but thats how the world works). To be competitive Zim developers need to up their game not at a technology level but at a business level.
You have never developed anything. What do you know?
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