South Africa’s first geo-fenced mobile payment system Gust Pay has released a BETA version of its system and expanded footprint to Cape Town as part of a pilot phase.
As HumanIPO previously reported, Gust Pay, or just Gust, is a Stellenbosch (South Africa) technology startup launched in April.
Founded by Alan Knott-Craig Jr., Gust is part of the World of Avatar group of companies and is closely linked to TrustFabric, a company with a platform that lets customers take control of their personal information and securely share it with organisations and businesses of choice.
Founder of Gust, Joe Botha, explained the importance of a fast payment process saying one of their goals for developing the geo-fenced mobile payment system was to create the fastest in-shop mobile payment system.
He elaborated on how Gust compared to the standard card-payment process speed saying: “Where a standard card payment can take two minutes, we can complete a full payment experience in less than 10 seconds.”
The just released BETA version of the system runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The app should also be available in the Apple App Store in the next few days. Gust is busy developing an Android app, while a BlackBerry version is in the planning stages.
The pilot phase has seen Gust receive support from some mobile phone manufacturers as Botha went on to explain: “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the support from the local representatives of big industry players such as Apple, LG and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, sending us development hardware for each of their platforms,”.
“In building the latest version of the app we focused on the enrollment process, close integration with TrustFabric, an updated UI design and included additional security and privacy enhancements,” said Botha while explaining the aim of the new BETA version.
We wait to see when Gust will be available to the public in the rest of South Africa as well as to witness whether it enjoys similar uptake as other mobile payment systems have — given the quick and popular adoption of mobile payment systems.
