Introducing 2015 with Beyonic Collections, API access and more.
In 2014, we helped businesses streamline mobile payments and reduce cash usage in the field. We delivered over 5,000 corporate payments to over 600 field staff and beneficiaries. We increased visibility and collaboration around payments with 2,858 attachments, 178 comments, 60 groups and 131 corporate users across 39 organizations.
Introducing Beyonic Collections
However, when dealing with cash in the field, very often, you’re not just giving it out, but also collecting it from staff, beneficiaries and customers. In order to further our “get-rid-of-cash” goal, we’d like to open 2015 by introducing Beyonic Collections.
Beyonic Collections make it very easy for organizations using Beyonic’s platform to set up a system for collecting cash over mobile. We’ll be rolling out Beyonic collections in 3 phases.
- Phase 1 is live, and lets your payees use their mobile money “pay bill” interfaces to send you money. All an organization has to do is choose a reference keyword in their account’s collection settings, and then communicate the collection instructions to their field operators. Funds will be received into your Beyonic account and will be accessible immediately. Find out more here.
- Phase 2 will roll out over the next month and is designed to make the process even easier for your staff and beneficiaries. Organizations will be able to initiate collection requests, and all the payee has to do is confirm their PIN to accept the payment.
- Lastly, we’ll enable your field operatives to initiate collection requests via mobile, greatly improving the ability to collect ad-hoc payments in the field.
Beyonic Collections work alongside Beyonic Payments to make cash use in the field history.
And, it is API enabled!
Introducing the Beyonic API
The Beyonic API has been live for a couple of months, and some early adopters have been using it to gain programatic access to their Beyonic accounts, and connect their other systems to the Beyonic platform. The API gives programatic access to Beyonic’s object model via a REST API, and provides hooks for receiving notifications when certain events occur in your Beyonic account.
With the API, you can:
- Initiate payments to field staff from third party systems, for example, your sales CRM could automatically calculate commissions for sales staff and initiate payments to their mobile phones.
- Receive notifications of any collections received, and do further processing, like delivering a service or notifying a customer that a payment has been received.
- Receive notifications when payments get approved, disbursed or undergo other status changes.
- Query your account for all payments or collections and import the data into another system.
- And more…
Even better, we provide native libraries for Ruby, PHP, Python and Java, to make it easy to connect your system to Beyonic.
All you need to get started is log into your Beyonic Account and find your API key. API developers can access the API documentation here, and technical support is available via tech-at-beyonic.com.
More goodies for 2015
We’ve been busy rolling out other improvements, some of which we’d like to share:
One button to pay all contacts
You’ll now see a “Pay” button on the contacts’ list and individual contact pages. Click that button to initiate a payment to a contact. On the contact list page, you’ll first need to select at least one contact to activate the button.
Copy an old payment
Want to re-send a previous payment? You don’t need to start from scratch. Payments now have a “Copy” button that will initiate a new payment with the information from the old one. Edit the new payment to your liking and click “Send”.
No need to remember withdrawal fees
I teased that we’d be introducing auto-calculation of withdrawal fees, and it’s here. Few people can remember the various withdrawal fees for different amounts on each network. Now, when sending a mobile money payment, you can choose to auto-calculate withdrawal fees by checking the box at the top of the withdrawal fees column.
Send us your feedback!
We wish you a happy new year, and would love to hear back from you at info-at-beyonic.com.