E-Tranzact advocates increased awareness on cashless policy

Ben Uzor Jr

Valentine Obi, chief executive officer, E-Tranzact has again re-emphasised the seemingly low awareness and enlightenment activities being experienced on the country’s road to developing a cashless economy will need to be adequately addressed for Nigeria to ensure the success of the initiative. Obi said while the country was making improvement in infrastructure development, one area that needed more attention was in awareness creation. “One particular area that will require more attention for us, as a country, to record resounding success in our road to implementing a cashless economic policy lies in awareness. Currently, awareness activities still leave much to be desired. So we need to increase the tempo. If all the facilities are there, and people do not have adequate knowledge about their usage it is useless and we may not record much success,” he said.

Obi, who spoke at a mobile payment forum, a seminar/exhibition organised by eTranzact in Lagos recently, said the increase in availability e-payment facilities needed to be matched by the level of usage, adding this can only be driven by holistic approach to creating awareness. Speaking on the business activities of eTranzact aimed at driving the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Obi said the company is a leading provider of mobile transaction services leveraging on its award-winning mobile switching platform to provide secure, convenient and cost effective e-payment solutions.

While stating that the future of e-payment id mobile, which eTranzact has been championing, Obi said, at the beginning of the company’s operations in 2003, “we saw a future where mobile phones will become a major channel for e-payment services thereby creating easy access to financial transactions. Since then, we have focused on this vision since 2003 when we launched our eTranzact Mobile Commerce , the forerunner of the eTranzact Mobile Banking services.” He said though there were challenges relating to infrastructure, security and compatibility of the e-payment devices at the beginning, “Today, we have moved forward as eTranzact has successfully surmounted these challenges, making us the leading e-payment solution company in Nigeria and providing world-class electronic switching and mobile payment services.”

He added that to further build up its vision, eTranzact was recently granted licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria to run a mobile money service in Nigeria. “This gave birth to PocketMoni, a service that allows users to send and receive money, pay their bills, anywhere, anytime, via their mobile phones.” He said eTranzact’s feature-rich, user-friendly and interactive mobile payment apps work on all mobile phones and tablets and “comes in various OS platforms - iOS, Android, Blackberry, OVI, WindowsPhone, and Java.”