Empowering Women as Entrepreneurs

Amethyst™ enables SMEs to earn commissions and fee income from facilitating transactions, while also enabling SMEs to sell their goods while being paid via a Customer’s Wallet into the Merchant’s Wallet.

Many women take advantage of the opportunity to become Agents and Merchants, reducing their cash risk, but earning a steady and scaleable income from offering the service.

Women are still a largely disempowered and disadvantaged class in society, on which so much of our future depends. With Amethyst™, it takes very little for a vendor to start operations. All that a woman will need is a GSM enabled phone, their FICA documentation, and a willing attitude. Once set up, the Agent can start taking deposits and earning a commission, from there enabling airtime and Withdrawals is a simple matter of time.

Some of the great success stories out of the various territories where Amethyst has services MMT solutions is that some women started as street merchants, and a few years later own their own stores. Enabling Merchants to take payments via Wallets saves the Merchant costs and reduced cash risk.

Disrupting the forms of transactability

We believe that transactability should be in the lowest of hierarchical needs, right along with access to information and the internet. Transactability pertains both the cost of transactions, as well as the ease of access – making access seamless in the day-to-day journey of the Consumer, Merchant, Agent, and Corporate.

In the payments journey, every party involved does their part and takes a cut for it. South Africa’s National Payment System is one of the leading and most advanced and regulated in the world, and we have protecting legislation and regulations on transaction costs, however, many South Africans still find the traditional instruments too expensive.

With Amethyst™, you control the fee structure, commission structure, as well as the prices for transactions, and whether there are any fees at all. This means that the attractiveness for the Consumer, together, without many configurable channels, including App, USSD, Card and ATM access enables both ease of access, and control over costs.

Accountability & Integrity through Technology™

Some Banks and SARB define remittance as Cash to Cash or Account to Cash only. Utilising a Wallet solution to facilitate international remittance will require Reserve Bank approval per territory and logistics and operational implementations, but the technology is already enabled to facilitate these solutions.

PMT will use existing Banking backbone infrastructure in other territories to enable interoperability functions for remittance across territories, where the Master Crimson™ enables the financial switching between the territories for Wallet systems. The actual moving of the funds remains within the backbone infrastructure.

PMT makes use of Crimson™, our core financial switch, which facilitates ISO8583 transactions for both Issuing and Acquiring institutions, currency conversion, and message switching and translation. Sending funds from South Africa to other countries from Amethyst™ to Amethyst™ will be facilitated through Crimson™.

The mechanisms on how this will be managed need to be discussed in terms of retailer integration in the territory, or the use of existing IMV integrations and infrastructure. However, the means to facilitate international remittance and compliance from a technical perspective through a Wallet solution is catered for in the PMT solution set. Amongst others, Amethyst™ can facilitate Cash Out for unregistered Users for remittance as was done successfully in EcoCash.

Accountability & Integrity through Technology™

Amethyst™ provides the means for bursaries to be paid into the Student’s Wallet and sub-divided to ensure that the allocated funds are used as intended into the various sub-Wallets. Once in the sub-Wallet rules dictate if money can be moved between Wallets, and what the Wallets can be used for. This means that money for textbooks cannot be used for grocery shopping for example.

In addition, full reporting and auditing of transactions, spend, and appropriation of funds are automatically available to sponsors. Students, therefore, learn to deal responsibly with money, learn to budget, while there is full visibility and accountability in the system regarding the funds.

Furthermore, easy access to payment methodologies will empower the student to transact using both their mobile interface, as well as the Wallet Debit Card. This will reduce Merchant costs for merchants onsite at the university, increase sale volumes and reduce transaction time, while the student can also swipe their card outside of the university merchant network, and withdraw funds at ATMs when needed.