PAYGO solar companies integrate into SWIFTA’s agent network

In efforts to remove the bottlenecks hindering energy access to households in communities, five leading solar home systems companies: Azuri Technologies, A Solar, Oolu Solar, Smarter Grid International (SGI), and Sosai Renewable Energy Company have been successfully integrated into SWIFTA’s 20,000+ strong cash collection agent network.

The integration follows a rigorous User Acceptance Test (UAT) initiated and financed by the Nigerian Off-Grid Market Programme (NoMAP), recently, to ease subscription collection from unbanked Pay As You Go (PAYGO) customers of the companies.
The six-week integration was financed and project-managed by (NoMAP, a market building programme jointly supported by the Shell Foundation, and USAID, aims to, amongst other things, address the current difficulties faced by solar home systems (SHS) companies in collecting payment from unbanked customers.
 
The system is designed such that, a PAYGO customer from any of the five companies with a subscription plan can renew its subscription through SWIFTA’s mobile or static agents leveraging on the company’s proprietary OMNIBRANCH platform.

Speaking in Lagos, NoMAP’s Programme Manager, Adedotun Eyinade, said: “Customers who are unbanked and living off the grid often face the arduous task of not being able to access Pay As You Go Solar since there are limited options to pay for their monthly subscriptions. Thanks to the integration into Swifta agent’s network, PAYGO customers can now seamlessly pay for their monthly subscription through cash collection agents.

“NoMAP views the pilot as a workaround to address the challenges associated with Nigeria’s low mobile money uptake which makes it difficult for unbanked customers to pay for solar unlike their peers in East Africa.”“It is hoped that these five companies that we have partnered on the integration will be able to expand into new off-grid communities since collection risk will be addressed by this integration,” Adedotun added.

NoMAP will collect and report evidence of improvement in sales, churn, default rate, customer experience, and energy access to the unserved. Swifta is an information technology company that offers a wide range of professional IT services and products. Swifta’s business strategy focuses on offering expert managed services, integration, development services to clients as well as the provision of viable and scalable enterprise software solutions with a focus on delivering exceptional services clients. Swifta’s proprietary platform, called OmniBranches manages a 20,000-strong agent network for last mile collection.