The South African Post Office (SAPO) will be able to offer Internet banking services to its customers within the next couple of months, according to company executives.
"Our new Internet banking capability is currently available to internal Post Office staff on a trial basis - and soon we will be rolling it out for all our customers," says SAPO CEO Khutso Mampeule.
Hannes van der Merwe, GM of operations at the SAPO's banking division, PostBank, says he hopes many of the roughly 2.2 million PostBank card-based customers will be attracted by the service.
The PostBank has seven million customer names on its database, and about 3.8 million "active accounts". Of those, about 1.6 million are purely book-based customers, notes Van der Merwe, meaning that they would be unable to access the online service.
"There are still a few technical developments taking place," he adds. "The login procedure - for instance - is not the ideal one that we want."
The trial with internal employees began on 23 August. PostBank is using a login process known as Flexcube, a solution developed by Indian IT company i-Flex Solutions.
Cellphone banking is expected to be introduced sometime later this year.
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