According to the World Bank, 250 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean—representing more than 60 percent of the adult population—are still unbanked and, as a consequence, unable to access plastic, checks, or other banking tools that make life easy. To pay their bills each month, they must stand on line for hours. Now, there’s a better solution for utility customers in that region.
Georgia-based PayGo has partnered with ELO Sistemas Electronicas, an electronic metering provider based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to bring prepayment and post-payment smart meter applications to customers in 16 Latin American countries. The deal combines ELO’s smart metering expertise with PayGo’s patent-pending software billing applications, as well as its cloud-based customer enrollment system.
The agreement will integrate the PayGo platform with ELO smart meters to help Latin American utility customers increase their ability to manage when, where, and how they pay for energy, as well as to help them to reduce their energy spend. Indeed, industry studies suggest that prepaid participants save as much as 10 percent on electricity.
PayGo’s firmware is embedded in either a smart meter or the NIC (network interface card) of the deployed communications network. Once activated via a downloadable key, PayGo uses its distributed intelligent logic and processing power to pass transactions between the utility, the consumer and the payment processing network.
By Cheryl Kaften, TMCnet Contributor