At the heart of South Africa’s new contactless, prepaid smart card system for public transit fares, Aconite Prepaid Value Manager manages complex processing specific to smart prepaid products. Integrated with Traderoot Africa (Pty) Ltd’s Universal Prepaid Issuing Platform (UPIP) software, this software solution is licensed to a large South African transit payments processor and approved by South Africa’s Ministry of Transport for use in relation to transit ticket payments.

This proven solution supports a simple, powerful customer proposition: enabling public taxi-bus passengers to purchase tickets quickly and easily. It benefits taxi operators by displacing cash with secure chip card transactions, which speeds up fare transactions; achieves cost reductions; and mitigates fraud, theft and related crimes. 50,000 cards were issued for the pilot project in 2010; numbers are expected to rise to 800,000 within 12 months and 2,000,000 in 24 months as the solution is rolled out more widely. It is widely accepted that, within 3 years, 10 million cards will be in issue.

Aconite Prepaid Value Manager supports closed and open-loop smart prepaid payment products that may be accepted in offline and online POS (point-of-sale) terminals using contact or contactless interfaces. These products can be issued on smart cards (also accepted at ATMs), chip-enabled tokens and mobile ‘phones.

Meet Aconite at Cartes & Identification 2010 on stand 142, Aisle J, Hall 4, for demonstrations of this and other smart solutions, or see www.aconite.net for more information.