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“Etisalat Zantel” Launches Africa’s First Commercial NFC Service In Tanzania
Published Jul 12, 2011
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Africa’s first commercial Near Field Communications (NFC) payment service has been launched in Tanzania by Etisalat through its subsidiary, Zantel. The new offering dubbed ‘Touch and Go’ is a revolutionary enhancement to Zantel’s existing and rapidly expanding mobile financial service (zPesa).
“Touch and Go offers a convenient, secure, easy to use and versatile service that anyone can access,” said Essa Al Haddad, Etisalat Group Chief Marketing Officer. “The secret for the success of this service is the simplicity of the process. A customer can use “Touch and Go” with merchants to purchase goods, services, tickets or even mobile credit top-ups without needing to type any numbers or complicated commands. The customer just needs to bring device close to the merchant’s point of sale terminal and validate the transaction with a password.”
Etisalat’s/Zantel’s customers in Tanzania already using its zPesa service to perform person-to-person money transfer, merchant/utility payments or banking services from the their mobile phones can now swiftly execute secure transactions using Etisalat/Zantel’s simple to use, intuitive ‘Touch and Go’ NFC (Near Field Communication) interface.
Essa al Haddad continued: “Touch and Go is new, innovative and ideally suited to customers that want to use the technology to complement the existing experience and also to people who will use the service as the sole means of generating an income for their families.”
NFC is a relatively new technology that is now being introduced in markets around the world. Operators in African countries such as Tanzania, benefit from being able to leapfrog legacy systems and can directly adopt NFC for their customers.
In addition to “wow” effect associated with “Touch and Go”, the new service addresses issues of consumer literacy and educational, which represent a major challenge for the take-up of new services especially in the rural communities. “Touch and Go” easy to use interface will enable everyone to enjoy convenient payment services and participate in entrepreneurial activities within their own communities.
In addition, “Touch and Go” addresses key challenges of service acceptance to the country’s numerous street merchants. End-to-end transaction time of the process is much faster than traditional mobile financial service offerings or even credit/debit cards and the benefit for the merchant is immediate. With the availability of affordable POS devices, acceptance amongst merchants is expected to be high
Etisalat and its partners Oberthur Technologies and MasterCard have redefined innovation in the NFC arena showing benefit for all types of consumers from tech savvy entrepreneurs and university students, corporate customers and even the un-banked. The long established partnership is a precursor to the Etisalat Group’s progressive plans to rollout mobile financial services and NFC technology across its 18 markets in the Middle East, African and Asia
“The service launch represents another landmark for Oberthur in emerging markets with NFC SIM and mobile adaptor enablers combining to provide a state of the art secure technical platform, bringing a homogeneous end-user experience to Etisalat customers”, said Cedric Collomb, Director, Mobile Product Line, Oberthur Technologies.
For more information:
Etisalat Group Media Desk
Ms. Nahid Mudathir Hassan
Group Senior Manager Media Relations
Email: nahelsayed@etisalat.ae
Tel: (+971)050 - 6006556
Website: www.etisalat.ae
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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