Press Releases

Beyonic and Mercy Corps to Connect Mobile Money Payees to Payout Locations in Real Time.

3 min readAug 27, 2014

August 26, 2014 — Beyonic is excited to announce a partnership with Mercy Corps’ Agri-Fin Mobile program that aims to unlock access to formal financial services for the agricultural sector in Uganda. The partnership will improve mobile payments by connecting 200 mobile money agents and 10,000 mobile money recipients in real time, via an intelligent mobile and web-enabled service. This service is the first of its kind, and will help to increase mobile money liquidity at agent cash-out locations, improve agent’s capacity to plan their operations, and improve mobile money customers’ cash-out experience.

Everyone lauds the benefits of using electronic payments, and Beyonic continues to hear interesting stories from customers about the benefits of switching to its Funds-To-Phones platform, an enterprise cloud-based tool for managing and streamlining bulk payments to mobile. For instance, one customer no longer keeps large cash reserves in their field office, which significantly reduced losses during a recent burglary incident.

However, mobile payments are not without their challenges.

A lingering concern is that payees may not be able to cash-out when needed. The reason for this lack of liquidity is two fold. First, mobile money agents, who dole out cash, are not able to predict demand, and so cannot increase cash-on-hand in anticipation of increased demand. In fact, a recent HELIX, IFC and Micro Save report shows that 35% of agents lose 5 or more transactions a day due to a lack of float & this is primarily due to unpredictable demand. Second, payees often do not know the location and identity of all the agents in their vicinity, and as such, while some agents are overwhelmed, others do not get consistent traffic. Payees who cannot be served by an agent must go agent-hopping and often end up disgruntled and wary of mobile payments.

The majority of mobile money transactions still get cashed out within a few days (GSMA, INTERMEDIA), underscoring the importance of increasing the efficiency of the agent network. Beyonic’s customers already know when and where they are directing payments, and will be able to leverage this information to match payees to agents.

With this platform, businesses will be able to ensure that their payees are able to cash out and deploy mobile money funds transferred to them, in a timely manner. Agents will be able to predict spikes in demand better, and plan ahead, reducing stock-outs. They will also be able to access more mobile payment customers. And lastly, payees will be able to access information about payout options near them.

This is an exciting project for many of Beyonic’s and Agri-Fin’s partners, because it is tackling a key need in the bulk payment space, which is the fastest growing mobile money sub-sector (GSMA, 2013). In addition, Uganda has one of the highest levels of mobile money usage worldwide, higher than the world average (Pew Research Centre, 2013) and the agriculture value chain accounts for about a quarter of its GDP.

Beyonic and the Agri-Fin Mobile program will initially be working with Agricultural value-chain providers like Agrinet, FIT Uganda and KAD Africa, across MTN and Airtel’s mobile payment networks, with 200 mobile money agents and over 10,000 payees. Agri-Fin sees this as an important step towards meeting its program goals.

About Agri-Fin Mobile:

The Mercy Corps Agri-Fin Mobile program works with partners to build sustainable models, where farm and crop management tools and financial services are “bundled” in affordable, unified platforms and mobile phone channels to promote mass uptake commercially. The program targets partners with existing financial, MNO and agricultural technical service mobile platforms or applications, or demonstrated interest in developing and investing in them, and facilitates development of a business model whereby the bundling process provides an increased value proposition for each partner, such as, increased fee income, greater outreach or reduced risks.

About Beyonic:

Beyonic moves business beyond cash by working with mobile payment providers across East Africa to offer modern bulk payment tools and expertise to business customers, and helping businesses use mobile as a means of paying employees, vendors and customers. Beyonic’s Funds-To-Phones platform has processed thousands of payments to hundreds of payees across multiple organizations, and includes features like contact pre-verification, expense reporting, compliance, prepaid airtime delivery, among others.