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SA Lottery paperlessly on-boards retailers

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 07 Oct 2015

In becoming the official operator of the South African National Lottery on 1 June 2015, Ithuba has employed a paperless system for inducting retailers who sell lottery tickets across SA through Ithuba lottery terminals.

The process, which involves on-boarding and credit-vetting thousands of retailers all over the country, would ordinarily require substantial paperwork per retailer, including manually filling out extensive forms and the signing, scanning and printing of numerous documents, explains Michael Springer, MD at Pitney Bowes SA, the customer communication technology provider responsible for Ithuba's new paperless system.

The paperless system, built and implemented by Pitney Bowes' e-business division, pbVerify, which specialises in digitising specific, paper-intensive business processes, aims to make Ithuba's retailer induction process faster and less labour-intensive.

PbVerify's solution uses a tablet-based system to auto-fill digital form fields using personal and business information drawn from data sources such as credit bureaus, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission.

It also employs geolocation technology to capture the exact location of the retail site, even in remote areas, explains Leon van der Merwe, business development manager for Pitney Bowes SA.

"Once the information is captured, the retailers can sign the digital application form with an electronic signature. The back-office system at Ithuba then performs automated Companies and Intellectual Property checks, commercial credit checks and anti-fraud checks, digitising the entire vetting process," Van der Merwe concludes.

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