The Business Phone

August 13th 2009 marks an important and historic milestone in the growth story of The Business Phone, and our Kenyan subsidiary Paystream. We held a formal "signing" ceremony with the CEO of Kenswitch - George Wainaina - marking the occasion of certifying the completion of testing our technology partnership and allowing us to embark officially on our aggressive recruitment of merchants under our "aggregator" proposition.

Sam Ndegwa and George Wainaina

Kenswitch is a portal, or "switch", which facilitates financial transaction message and data communication between customer facing activity (up until now largely limited to ATM transactions but under our partnership now extends to Point of Sale terminal payment transactions) and the myriad of banks issuing the cards used by the various customers. Thus it allows for a common "translator" to ensure all the member banks can effectively share or leverage the same Point of Transaction hardware despite all of them issuing their own versions of ATM or debit cards.

Sam Ndegwa and George Wainaina

Why is this important to us? It goes to the heart of our proposition. We are now actively recruiting merchants with a value proposition which provides;

• Reliability; our Point of Sale terminals operate on GPRS technology, and are the first mass scale solution of this nature to be deployed in Kenya
• Security; all transactions performed on our terminals are automatically authorised by the system linkage to the underlying member banks
• Flexibility; via the Kenswitch partnership the merchant can now accept debit cards issued by 23 banks (and growing), whereas most merchants up until now have been "tied" to one issuer bank card. the impact on the growth of debit card usage in Kenya therefore should be dramatic
• Value Add; not only does our proposition attract greater "footfall" in the merchants core business, but our range of value added functionality such as mobile top ups creates an incremental revenue opportunity for the merchant.

Chris Edge and George Wainaina

The Kenswitch partnership is therefore critical and the formal signing ceremony marks the completion of over 12 months of intensive effort to integrate sytems. This is a groundbreaking and transformational development in our history and for our role in "....changing the way we pay...." in Kenya and beyond.