A quick look at BroadPay’s new merchant app

To cater to areas that have little or not access pay mobile phone bills, electricity and DStv/GOtv bills, the BroadPay app has been created as a point of sale (POS). It requires merchants to register their name, ID and phone numbers, and set a password, authenticated by an SMS to their phone, after which a pop-up telling them your account is low and need to top-up, pops up.

How do you deposit?

The BroadPay app comes with account details of 5 banks: Access, FNB, First Alliance, and Stanbic, where merchants can make a deposit in turn for Broadpay stock that they can resell to consumers in their area from their phones.

Merchant benefits:

The minimum amount of stock one can get is K1 (but who would anyway), and the seller/merchant gets 5% commission on all airtime and 1% on ZESCO and DStv/GOtv purchases. Commission is given in advance as stock by BroadPay. For DStv, the minimum purchase amount is K100.

Merchants also have a smaller mobile device to work with than other POS gadgets.

Requirements:

A smartphone (obviously) running on Android 4.0 or higher with about 10MB of space for the application.

Bright Chinyundu, CEO of BroadPay explained:

“This app isn’t for mobile customers. It’s for merchants. Over 60% of the population in Zambia don’t have bank accounts, so they can’t access mobile banking, hence they buy airtime from merchants who sell through scratch cards like the BroadPay point of sale machines that you see around in shops.

This app is basically meant to replace the old POS machines and scratch cards. We have POS machines but we cannot just deploy them anywhere. We need to establish that we are going to have a good return on investment based on the traffic of a particular area before deploying a POS machine.

The app can be downloaded by anyone regardless of how much they sell per day. In short, this app is for resellers, not users. We are adding such services as StarTimes/TopStar and Vodafone.

Why can’t we add more payment channels like our kiosks: Well, we intend to add many more channels. This is only the first part.”