A cashless economy is win-win for all

Editor, Refer to the letter, “All payment systems can co-exist” (The New Times, July 8). Rwanda Development Board is currently undertaking a project in public technology infrastructure key that will ease online transactions by authenticating online identities. If this is paired with mobile payments, it should address the issue of security and online governance. This is a well analysed article. Personally, yes, ATMs need to go mainly because of the heavy capital expenditure required to roll out the system. Secondly, even with the most efficient ATM rollout, there will be some areas which will not be covered. Simtel Rwanda needs to rethink its strategy or pretty soon they will be obsolete. Kigali Girl ************* Well, Simtel doesn’t only run ATMs; they provide the backbone and infrastructure to run them, which agreeably is very costly. But this infrastructure is also enabled to support mobile transactions which are currently faced with minimal regulations. Banks worried about mobile financial services eating into their bread and butter will enter into this sector, but these being expensive ventures (with long term returns on investment) will look for shared infrastructure and roll-out, which will bring in entities like Simtel. Additionally, due to factors that will always remain like agent float, mobile will focus on high volume low value transactions, while ATMs shall still cater for low volume high value transactions. And these two technologies will serve different purposes but happily co-exist. Beatrice Musaneza

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A cashless economy is win-win for all