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LAST week I challenged the Fin24.com community to give cashless transacting a try. Unfortunately, this ran into problems from the word go.
The first comment that came in after I ran my column was from somebody who had put it to the test last year. His response was: "I gave up trying to use the technology after being left hanging by the support consultant who didn't know how it worked."
Being an optimist, I tried to give service providers the benefit of the doubt and have another stab at it.
Since December 2009, I've tried unsuccessfully to register for mobile wallet Mowaly, so I thought I'd give MiMoney a shot.
I was able to browse to the MiMoney site on my three-year-old Nokia cellphone. However, the splash screen didn't display correctly and I couldn't input any information into the fields.
I e-mailed its support centre last week Thursday and I'm still awaiting a reply beyond the automated service ticket confirming that my query had been received.
Tricky technology that doesn't do the job
I'm under no illusions that my column reader base is probably not much bigger than my trusty subeditor, my mom and the odd person who comes back in the hope that I will again write something about strip clubs, but surely the service providers would have jumped at the opportunity to showcase their technology?
With due respect, I am the owner of an online technology company and consider myself tech and financially savvy. Yet if I can't make this technology work, how is my housekeeper or my 12-year-old daughter going to?
Service providers can't complain about low adoption of the technology by consumers or merchants if it isn't user friendly.
Another point raised by people who responded to the column was low literacy levels - which make cashless transacting quite difficult from a sign-up perspective. Then there's also the fact that people can see and feel cash, as they are unable to do with e-currency.
Some readers, however, observed that more widespread e-currency use would help reduce credit card fraud for online merchants.
Others were more sceptical, saying that most of the so-called mobile banking solutions were nothing but a cellphone linked to a bank account. While the target market is the non-banked population, the technology tends to be adopted by existing bank clients.
Suffice it to say that this exercise has been a bit of a letdown, but probably provides quite a good proxy for where South Africa stands as far as cashless transacting for the layman goes. I welcome any counter opinions.
- Fin24.com
