Beyonic the winner of the ACIA 2014 service excellence Awards has announced a partnership with Mercy Corps’ Agricultural-Financial (Ari-Fin) Mobile program, to improve mobile payments by connecting over 200 mobile money agents and 10,000 mobile money recipients in real time in Uganda.
Using it’s Funds-To-Phones platform Beyonic continues to hear interesting stories from customers about the benefits of it’s enterprise cloud-based tool it uses to manage and streamline bulk payments to mobile. As part of the success stories for this program, customers will no longer need keep large cash reserves in their field office, which dramatically reduces losses in case of any burglary incident.
Current mobile money transactions have their own flaws for instance, the payees may not be able to cash-out when needed. The reason for this lack of liquidity can be because most mobile money agents,cannot predict demand and so cannot increase cash-on-hand in anticipation of increased demand. According to the press release, a recent HELIX, IFC and Micro Save report shows that 35% of agents lose 5 or more transactions a day due to a lack of float & this is primarily due to unpredictable demand. Another problem of current mobile money transactions is that, payees often do not know the location and identity of all the agents in their vicinity, and as such, while some agents are overwhelmed, others do not get consistent traffic. Payees who cannot be served by an agent must go agent-hopping and often end up disgruntled and wary of mobile payments.
Beyonic’s customers already know when and where they are directing payments, and will be able to leverage this information to match payees to agents. With this Funds-To-Phones platform, businesses will be able to ensure that their payees are able to cash out and deploy mobile money funds transferred to them, in a timely manner. Agents will be able to predict spikes in demand better, and plan ahead, reducing stock-outs. They will also be able to access more mobile payment customers. And lastly, payees will be able to access information about payout options near them.
Beyonic and the Agri-Fin Mobile program will initially be working with Agricultural value-chain providers like Agrinet, FIT Uganda and KAD Africa, across MTN and Airtel’s mobile payment networks, with 200 mobile money agents and over 10,000 payees. Agri-Fin sees this as an important step towards meeting its program goals.
