Headline Nov 09, 2014/

''' TO STUDENTS WITH LOVE ''' : 

*SAM TRUST BANK* '''

BRIGHT STUDENTS like : 

Mariam/UK,  Rabo/UK, Dee,  Malala/UK, Hussain, Ali, Ehsan, Ashfaq, Shahzaib , Salaar/US,  Bilal/US/, Ahsen/Mustafa (LUMS), Haanyia,  Faizan/Fast/ Vishnu/India/  Zaeem/Hazeem/ Anique, and a:

Dunce like my poor-self,  -understand the insightful that : ''Liking''  is by no means Leading.

A great shift is unfolding right now with social technology. And !WOW! will be leading. Social media's leaps in the past five years only hint at what social technology will do over the next five years.

!WOW!'s research and case study on a great model for  ''SAM TRUST BANK'' continues through the midnight oil. So, here is one great model for you all to look at:

ALL GOVERNMENTS -the world over, are very keen on e-payments:

''The less cash is used or accepted, the more people are pulled into the formal, taxpaying economy,'' says Mr Paul Edwards: 

'' CONTENTED people don't innovate,'' says Paul Edwards, the boss of  Emerging Market Payments: 

EMP provides the switches and wiring for electronic payments in Africa. Mr Edwards is certainly the restless type.

In the early 1990s he was boss of Multichoice, a South African pay-tv firm which expanded into the rest of Africa. A few years later he ran MTN, Africa's largest mobile-phone firm. EMP is his third big venture in Africa.

Its goal is to bring electronic payment services to a largely unbanked continent.

Only  15-20% of Africans have bank accounts but  60-70% have mobile phones, says Mr Edwards.Mobile-phone credits are already used as a means of settling bills. 

A quarter of Kenya's  GNP flows through  M-PESA, the country's mobile-phone service. The gap in penetration between banking and mobile telephony is a gauge of the latent demand for electronic payment services, he says.

Most transactions in Africa are settled in cash but over time more consumers are likely to opt for the safety and convenience of  e-payments. 

EMP is building systems to ensure that such transactions flow smoothly.

Mr Edwards likes to make bet where he sees pent-up demand. He took pay-TV into Africa on a hunch that even poor folk would pay for an alternative to state broadcasters.

His boldest gamble was in 2001 when MTN paid $285 million for a mobile-phone license in Nigeria, a notoriously tricky place to do business. The country then had just a few hundred thousand fixed-line telephones.

''I thought: 'There is surely latent demand here,'' says Mr Edwards. He phoned his old firm and was told that Nigeria had  10m pay-TV subscribers.

If you can afford a TV, you can afford a mobile phone, he reasoned. Nigeria now accounts for over 30% of MTN's revenue 

Multichoice and MTN were established in South Africa before they tried their luck in riskier places. By contrast EMP is a pure frontier-market firm set up by Actis, a private-equity company.

Its roots lie with Mediterranean Smart Card, a venture started by Visa to bring chip-and-pin payments technology to Egypt. EMP acquired it in 2010 as the basis for  ***continent wide platform***  that

Banks, credit-card issuers or telecom firms could use to process payments.

It now serves  130 banks  in  35 countries in the Middle East and Africa.

It clears payments, supplies  point-of-sale terminals to shops and etches personal data onto the cards it issues on behalf of its customers.  

Running a payment platform requires specialist skills, says Mr Edwards, so banks are content to outsource the job to a trusted third party. The more clients EMP attracts, the more it reaps the benefits of scale.

A single platform makes it quicker and cheaper to pay money across borders. Banks can launch a service in several countries at once.

It took years for First Data, a big American payments firm, to evolve from a bunch of regional outfits. A pan-African version is likely to emerge more quickly. But it will not be easy.

Six months after EMP's acquisition in Egypt, there was a revolution. The government switched off the Internet and mobile-phone network.

The firm then bought a business in Jordan, which earned  10% of its revenues in Syria; now the proportion is zero.

A fast take-up in mobile money could help EMP but its fortunes do not depend on it. The success of M-PESA has not been matched outside Kenya, in part because banks have sought to stop phone companies from offering financial services.

But EMP's open-access model is agnostic on whether bank cards or mobile-phones will be the main means of  e-payment.

But EMP has won a contract to manage the cashless payment of custom duties at the Doulala port in Cameroon.

A paperless system should cut delays and corruption.

The firm is working with the Nigerian government to introduce a national identity card that can be used for payments:

''People need to make payments without risk,''  he says-

''And cash doesn't do that job.''

With respectful and loving dedication to Pakistan's formidable sons and daughters:

O'' Captain Imran Khan,  Masud Reza,  Amin Malik, Dr M Jawaid Khan, Imran Basit, Fahim Khan, Naveed Iqbal Querishi/, Imran Bukhari, Shahid Shakoor, Saanyia,  Hamad Khan, Hyder Naqvi, Nusrat Hussain, Qazi Ahmed Khan/, Farzana Khan, Irum Khan, Zainab Khan/ Shazia Gul, Amina Khan, Armeen, Saanyia Qiser/ Sannan, Ibrahim, Saad, Fahad, Waleed and Imran Khan. 

See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Cash Be Cowed '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless