Aricent, a global innovation, technology and services company focused exclusively on communications, today announced its role in the joint development of a new mobile payment application for Pocit, a subsidiary of major information technology company, Tradebridge, backed by Capitec Bank, the fastest growing bank in South Africa.
Pocit, a sister division of healthbridge, was formed as a spin-off from healthbridge's payment solution for healthcare providers. Pocit's personal mobile payment tool was launched recently and is promoted as being the simplest, most convenient and secure way to pay anyone, anytime, anywhere through a cellphone number.
Developed by Aricent, the mobile component of the Pocit application allows anyone with a credit card or bank account to make payments directly from the mobile application via a cellphone, without having to know the recipient's specific banking details. Once registered with Pocit, a user can receive, send, request and store money.
“We are excited to be at the forefront of banking and mobile industry convergence by bringing to market Pocit's personal mobile banking tool,” said David Reynders, Managing Director of Pocit. “Aricent's deep domain expertise in mobile applications, networks and operating systems made them the ideal partner for us in this bold endeavour.”
The handset application was developed on an open source, framework J4ME, which was greatly enhanced by Aricent's development team over the life of the project, resulting in a flexible framework on which more complex functionality could be added in subsequent phases.
“Mobilising Pocit's secure, innovative banking application across hundreds of legacy and newly released phones presented a number of technical hurdles. For example, we had to optimise the processing and memory limitations of older devices, while maximising the features of new devices such as touch screens,” said Elsje de Wit, Managing Director of Aricent South Africa. “Banking and mobile networking are a natural fit, and we are very please to co-create this compelling application with Pocit.”
Pocit is already attracting positive attention around the globe, from as far afield as the United States and other parts of Africa. In December 2008, the company launched Pocit Money, which is similar to a shopping voucher. It allows money to be stored in the phone for multiple uses. As an example, parents can send money to a child at university in another town, who can then use that money to pay for a variety of services. Pocit Elect is a world first for elections, based on the model used by Barack Obama and his team. Pocit Elect takes the idea of cellphone fundraising for political parties further by giving a single sms number for donating to any one of multiple political parties.
According to a recent report issued by Telecoms.com, Juniper Research states that the mobile payment market is currently dominated by digital content purchases, and predicts that the future of mobile payments will be driven by users transferring money to make other purchases. Juniper also says that this shift will result in the overall mobile payments market to increase by a factor of 10 between now and 2013.
Share