The Business Phone

Moving on from traditional terminal/phone sales model, the company created a recurring revenue model generated through income taken from each and every type of payment transaction and service provided for participating organisations. Hence it is an infrastructure network that produces high rewards in terms of long-term revenues.

East Africa was the perfect location because it is probably one of the last remaining geographies for high growth. It is heavily populated with people able to support massive demand for pre pay mobile phones. It is cash orientated, under-banked and the local people early adopters for all the applications that are available on The Business Phone/PayStream terminal network.

In developed counties and indeed underdeveloped countries there are national utilities that serve the population e.g. Electricity grids, Gas grids, water and sewage pipes, land line telephone networks, mobile phone masts etc used to distribute electricity, gas, water, effluent and telephony to the public and businesses. There can only usually be one or two networks supporting these functions due to the infrastructure and support costs.

The vision of Paystream is to provide national payment infrastructure networks in various countries to allow many and convenient locations for the public to pay for a whole range of services provided by both the above organisations e.g. electricity, telephony etc and many others such as lottery tickets, promotional vouchers, bill payments, internal money transfer, congestion charging, health benefits, unemployment benefits etc by both cash and card. Payments can be made to an organisation by the public or paid to the public from an organisation.

The PayStream network provides an infrastructure to link client businesses with their consumers and vice versa rather than each organisation setting up their own structures. It is much more cost effective for the organisations to share the costs of the PayStream network by paying a transaction based service charge to PayStream for use of the network.

This model is well established in the UK and Europe and The Business Phone and its partners are bringing it to Africa on the back of the introduction of affordable wireless data networks provided by the mobile phone operators.