Johannesburg, 09 May 2017
Globetom's cloud service for electronic distribution and payment solution management is making a market entry into Nigeria. Globetom's GP3 platform has been certified by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System as a payment terminal service provider.
The initial roll-out will take airtime virtual top-up, electricity bill payments and token vending to market, followed by airtime data bundle purchases, voucher PIN vending, pay-television purchases, ISP top-up and bundle purchases as well as water payments.
The distribution and payment solution is offered through access points such as mobile point of sale devices and a mobile application available on the Android Play store, and soon on the Apple iStore. The mobile application enables wholesale distributors to rapidly expand their retail outlet footprint in a cost-effective manner.
Wholesale distribution margin squeeze is expected to increase, especially as average revenue per user (ARPU) in the GSM market declines and competition increases. At the same time, it is also anticipated that, as digital service roll-out expands, the demand for the rapid deployment of new service offers and bundles for purchase through retail outlets will rise. Globetom expects these two market drivers to place pressure on wholesale electronic distributors to be extremely agile to survive.
Globetom's prepaid and payment distribution platform assists wholesale distributors in embracing these demands. New products and services are configured on the platform and are immediately available at all retail outlets for sale. Against the backdrop of margin squeeze, the pay-as-you-grow commercial model on offer by Globetom, coupled with a mobile application for product vending, means its wholesale distribution customers have limited capital layout to get off the ground, with an agile electronic distribution solution.
Globetom's GP3 payment and distribution platform offers wholesale distributors the opportunity to convert physical distribution to an electronic distribution solution under a platform as a service model. The back-end platform is hosted in South Africa at Teraco, and Globetom has proven the cloud use case in various countries in Africa and the Middle East, serviced from the South African cloud base.
Globetom has been providing a cloud-based, multi-tenant solution for distribution in four countries in Africa and the Middle East since 2012, and has maintained a 99.9% availability level for its customers since inception. While Globetom still perceives this as a new market solution for its business, it has already processed several hundred million rands worth of transactions. The market solution proves the ability to service Africa with cross-border cloud solutions and dispels the myth that African network infrastructure is too weakly developed to leverage the benefits of cloud services and digital marketplace development.
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