Using mobile money as point-of-sale payments is now easier and more convenient- every payment is also receipted.

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Square widened its assault on the payments market in May 2011, launching this new application designed to replace point-of-sale terminals with iPads and cards usable with mobile phones. The company currently claims to be processing $4 million in mobile payments every day and expects to hit the $1 billion-per-day landmark within the next year.

The Business Phone is on the same trajectory and has the backing of some of Africa’s leading pan African banks. The company is following the lead set by Square in the USA, and will roll out this new application this year where it has the fundamental benefits of having established itself ahead of the competition, the infrastructure in place, and the relationships with the leading banks and Visa/Mastercard that will allow businesses in Africa to adopt this new technology rapidly. The Business Phone has exclusive rights to this new technology in all of Africa , except South Africa.

The free plug-in reader and app will be available first in Kenya, then Nigeria and Ghana shortly afterwards, letting users accept credit and debit card payments through their iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android devices, with The Business Phone Ltd and its East African subsidiary taking a small commission per transaction.

This news brings significant value addition to The Business Phone business model. All the hard work over the past 5 years has put the company in a position to benefit from this innovation and the success of Square in the USA highlights the opportunity for the company to use this to drive huge growth and profitability this year and beyond.

Read more about this on the Business Insider website

Graham Gilmour, CEO of The Business Phone Ltd intends to follow the lead set in the USA and roll out across Africa where the company already has all the required infrastructure and relationships in place to allow  Corporate sales forces to mobilse at low cost.

The mobile phone card reader business is proving lucrative in the USA, where Square, set up by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had shipped over 800,000 readers by November 2011 and reached a valuation of $1 billion, with Visa and Richard Branson among its investors.

In May 2011, Square widened its assault on the payments market, launching an application designed to replace point-of-sale terminals with iPads and cards with mobile phones. The company currently claims to be processing $4 million in mobile payments every day and expects to hit the $1 billion-per-day landmark within the next year. The Business Phone Ltd is on the same trajectory and has the backing of some of Africa’s leading banks.

The free plug-in reader and app will be available first in Kenya and then shortly after in Nigeria and Ghana. Users will be able to accept credit and debit card payments through their smartphone and iPad devices with The Business Phone Ltd and its East African subsidiary taking a small commission per transaction.

What comes across in the video is the sense of hope and enthusiasm of the children and the gratitude shown to everyone who has helped in any small way in the upkeep of the centre.

The Business Phone is proud to be associated with such a worthy cause and you can continue to donate by clicking here.

CEO Graham Gilmour will again give a Showcase Presentation at the event as well as at the West Africa event later on this year

The 2 day COMESA event is to take place at KICC in Nairobi on 7 & 8 March 2012.

Click here to go to the event website

Dec 3rd 2011 | from The Economist

THE shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.

Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.

The commodities boom is partly responsible. In 2000-08 around a quarter of Africa’s growth came from higher revenues from natural resources. Favourable demography is another cause. With fertility rates crashing in Asia and Latin America, half of the increase in population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginning to develop. The big question is whether Africa can keep that up if demand for commodities drops.

Copper, gold, oil—and a pinch of salt

Optimism about Africa needs to be taken in fairly small doses, for things are still exceedingly bleak in much of the continent. Most Africans live on less than two dollars a day. Food production per person has slumped since independence in the 1960s. The average lifespan in some countries is under 50. Drought and famine persist. The climate is worsening, with deforestation and desertification still on the march.

Some countries praised for their breakneck economic growth, such as Angola and Equatorial Guinea, are oil-sodden kleptocracies. Some that have begun to get economic development right, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia, have become politically noxious. Congo, now undergoing a shoddy election, still looks barely governable and hideously corrupt. Zimbabwe is a scar on the conscience of the rest of southern Africa. South Africa, which used to be a model for the continent, is tainted with corruption; and within the ruling African National Congress there is talk of nationalising land and mines.

Yet against that depressingly familiar backdrop, some fundamental numbers are moving in the right direction. Africa now has a fast-growing middle class: according to Standard Bank, around 60m Africans have an income of $3,000 a year, and 100m will in 2015. The rate of foreign investment has soared around tenfold in the past decade.

China’s arrival has improved Africa’s infrastructure and boosted its manufacturing sector. Other non-Western countries, from Brazil and Turkey to Malaysia and India, are following its lead. Africa could break into the global market for light manufacturing and services such as call centres. Cross-border commerce, long suppressed by political rivalry, is growing, as tariffs fall and barriers to trade are dismantled.

Africa’s enthusiasm for technology is boosting growth. It has more than 600m mobile-phone users—more than America or Europe. Since roads are generally dreadful, advances in communications, with mobile banking and telephonic agro-info, have been a huge boon. Around a tenth of Africa’s land mass is covered by mobile-internet services—a higher proportion than in India. The health of many millions of Africans has also improved, thanks in part to the wider distribution of mosquito nets and the gradual easing of the ravages of HIV/AIDS. Skills are improving: productivity is growing by nearly 3% a year, compared with 2.3% in America.

All this is happening partly because Africa is at last getting a taste of peace and decent government. For three decades after African countries threw off their colonial shackles, not a single one (bar the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius) peacefully ousted a government or president at the ballot box. But since Benin set the mainland trend in 1991, it has happened more than 30 times—far more often than in the Arab world.

Population trends could enhance these promising developments. A bulge of better-educated young people of working age is entering the job market and birth rates are beginning to decline. As the proportion of working-age people to dependents rises, growth should get a boost. Asia enjoyed such a “demographic dividend”, which began three decades ago and is now tailing off. In Africa it is just starting.

Having a lot of young adults is good for any country if its economy is thriving, but if jobs are in short supply it can lead to frustration and violence. Whether Africa’s demography brings a dividend or disaster is largely up to its governments.

More trade than aid

Africa still needs deep reform. Governments should make it easier to start businesses and cut some taxes and collect honestly the ones they impose. Land needs to be taken out of communal ownership and title handed over to individual farmers so that they can get credit and expand. And, most of all, politicians need to keep their noses out of the trough and to leave power when their voters tell them to.

Western governments should open up to trade rather than just dish out aid. America’s African Growth and Opportunity Act, which lowered tariff barriers for many goods, is a good start, but it needs to be widened and copied by other nations. Foreign investors should sign the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which would let Africans see what foreign companies pay for licences to exploit natural resources. African governments should insist on total openness in the deals they strike with foreign companies and governments.

Autocracy, corruption and strife will not disappear overnight. But at a dark time for the world economy, Africa’s progress is a reminder of the transformative promise of growth.

Paystream, in partnership with sQuid, have provided a solution, whereby the people of Northern Kenya, affected by severe drought and famine, are issued with a contactless card.  These cards can only be used at charity approved stores and outlets for the purchase of food supplies, as intended by Aid agencies and their donors, and will help to ensure that aid gets to the right people and is spent on what it is intended for.

The traditional method used to distribute food aid is cash based, which brings with it a multitude of complications, often resulting in the misappropriation of funds.  Logistical problems and the high cost of transporting supplies to remote villages demand more efficient solutions.

SOS Children’s Villages (http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/) and Paystream have been working together with the local community and shop owners to devise a card that is loaded with value and can be used at specified POS terminals supplied to the stores.  It allows villagers to purchase supplies directly from the shops in their areas.  Communities are educated as to how the system works, the money that each holds and the kind of food stuff that they are allowed to purchase from the shops. Payments are secure, fast and efficient, significantly reducing the administration previously required by SOS to ensure the funds go where they are most needed.

All card based transactions will originate from approved card holders to POS devices deployed by Paystream to appointed stores.

SOS Children’s Villages ’ portal sets descriptions and payment details for the shopkeepers.  Simple and intuitive, data can be easily exported into SOS packages for quick and easy accounts reconciliation and visibility of payees.

Sam Ndegwa, CEO of Paystream Limited, said:

We are delighted to partner with SOS Children’s Villages and to be able to come up with a safe, reliable card based solution to help food aid get to the right people.  The benefits of being able to pay by smart card are endless, not only is it convenient, but the automated payments offer security for the merchant and SOS, and makes for easy monitoring, and management reconciliation.  We are currently trialing for 6 months with three stores in Marsabit, but are looking to roll similar programs out further across East Africa”

More importantly the solution is commercially viable for any company that wishes to remove cash from its transaction processing and replace it with an accountable and less risky mode of payment. These cards are mainly used in other countries in the transport industry, fast foods and ticketing environments. Paystream intends to introduce this concept in a big way across East Africa.

For further information, please contact:

Sam Ndegwa , CEO Paystream Ltd – +254 20-2519600/1/2 / sam@paystream.co.ke

Graham Gilmour, CEO The Business Phone – 07764 575 372 / graham@thebusinessphone.com

The centre would like to give a very big thank you to Lydia Hosegood, a pupil at St George’s School in Ascot, Berkshire, for her efforts in fundraising. Lydia raised an amazing £400 from four separate boot sales.

Diane Mwai, in charge of the Caretakers funds, has nothing but praise for Lydia. “What she has done is simply awesome!” she said of the fundraising.

The centre used the funds as a lump sum payment for the rent for the lower primary school which allows the school to be kept open for another whole year.