Paynet’s poison could be OneMoney’s meat.
NetOne introduced a bulk payments offer under their OneMoney mobile money brand some time back. The company is now seeing an opportunity to grow the uptake of this service given the stand off between local banks and Payserve, the South African company that dominates the bulk payments processing space in Zimbabwe.
What NetOne is saying
NetOne’s Chief Mobile Financial Services Officer, Nkosinathi Ncube says this:
At a time when individuals are craving the assurance that they will receive their salaries with speed, safety and consistency, the OnePay platform prides itself on its proven ability to deliver. OnePay is a secure solution offering convenience at affordable rates and is hassle free as transaction statements can be printed or viewed from the OnePay portal
How it works
OnePay allows an organisation to send out payments to a group of payees all at once. The batch size is up to 5 000 accounts and if you are sending money to the whole of Zimbabwe you can do as many batches as you like. This however is payment from OneMoney to OneMoney meaning the payees have to already have OneMoney accounts or be persuaded to have them.
As a standalone solution, OnePay is obviously not too different from their rival EcoCash Payroll but…
Where OnePay wins
Key word: interoperability. OneMoney is on the Zimswitch platform which makes it easy for the end recipients of OnePay bulk payments to instantly send money to almost any bank in Zimbabwe via Zipit. Paying merchants can also be through the OneMoney Zimswitch enabled debit card.
The low hanging fruit for NetOne here is government payments particularly for salaries and pensions. The government wins because they will be adopting a completely local solution that has no foreign currency obligation to meet and to boot they will be giving business to an entity they own.
NetOne wins if this happens because they can then capture a significant number of people to be on their network. This is an important segment too: their earnings may be very little but civil servants are part of the lucky few who have a regular income called a salary, the biggest subset of that elite world actually. Those are good customers to have.
The Paynet fiasco is a blessing to some other folks isn’t it? We wait to see how they execute. Telecash has its own bulk payments solution that was used by some NGO’s for beneficiary payouts. They offer the same benefits OnePay does but of course much less critical mass.
One response
sadly paynet was/is more than a batch processing system . . wonder what is going to happen to companies that use it and the integrations they had built with payroll solutions ,bank authentication systems,vendor payments etc . . . sadly this is not a system that can be replaced overnight contrary to hwta some might want to believe . . .