Reliable and secured financial services in remote areas

“SatFinAfrica” is a pilot project that demonstrated the suitability of the Sat3Play platform, originally designed for the consumer and SoHo market, to provide reliable and secured financial services (e.g. to money transfer companies, microfinance institutions, banks and Automated Teller Machines) in remote and underserved areas in emerging countries in Africa. SatFinAfrica targets remote sites of large organisations, in particular financial institutions, which have a critical need for a ubiquitous and secured telecommunication platform with adequate latency performance and privacy and acceptable service costs. Not covered by terrestrial communications means that these remote sites are generally not large enough to justify the investment in a classic corporate VSAT. Two main financial applications are targeted, namely, money transfer and automated telling machines (ATMs). In addition, SatFinAfrica also targets the development and provision of VNO (Virtual Network Operator) and QoS features for the Sat3Play platform to allow local distributors to autonomously manage the service profiles of their pools of customers and become, de-facto, local service operators. This is supported by the development of a monitoring & controlling tool (CMT, Customer Management Tool), which provides a user-friendly web-interface with different levels of rights to grant local distributors the required level of autonomy and ease of usage.