A new South African financial technology app called Slide promises to allow South African consumers to send money to anyone with a phone number or e-mail address — free of charge.
Founded by three young South Africans who recently returned from living in US, Slide allows users to send money without having to carry cash or know someone’s bank account details, said co-founder Irshad Kathrada in a statement on Monday.
“In the US, we witnessed the huge growth in payment methods and how easy it was to pay people.”
Those paying and receiving can be with any bank or mobile network operator,” Kathrada said.
The app, which works on Android and iOS devices, does not require users to go through a Fica process, but they do have to fill in a sign-up form to register.
Slide links with a user’s contacts so they can choose who to pay or add a new contact with a cell number or e-mail address. They add how much they want to pay, personalise the payment with a message, and authorise and send the money by selecting the bank they use. Payments are done using EFT secure technology direct from the sender’s bank account.
The recipient will be notified by SMS and e-mail and then prompted to download the app. The money can be cashed out at any time to their bank account. The money typically appears the next business day, irrespective of bank. The sender will get a confirmation that the funds have been received.
Person-to-person payments
“As Slide is a social payment mechanism, payments between contacts are as easy as sending a message. It really is the easiest way to pay another person, and as there’s nothing quite like it in South Africa, we expect rapid growth,” Kathrada said in the statement.
Person-to-person payments are a large part of the South African economy. According to a 2015 FinScope study, bank/ATM (43%) and supermarket money transfers (42%) currently dominate payment channels.
“Standard payments are often expensive and inconvenient, while cash is unsafe and not everyone has easy access to an ATM. This opened up the opportunity for Slide,” he said.
Kathrada, who has a finance degree and who worked for JPMorgan in Johannesburg, London and New York, said payments into the Slide network use the same security protocols as Internet banking. Payments from a bank are facilitated by CallPay using high-level encryption.
Kathrada’s co-founders are Terence Goldberg, who holds a master’s degree in mathematics and a second master’s degree in finance from Cambridge University, and Alon Stern, who moved to the US from South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship where he worked at Princeton University and travelled to more than 80 countries as part of his PhD research. — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media