MICROCAPITAL BRIEF: Solaris Offgrid Adds NuovoPay to PaygOps Platform, Boosting Retailers’ Ability to Lease Smartphones to Unbanked

Two providers of business-to-business services, UK-registered Solaris Offgrid and India’s NuovoPay, recently agreed to make NuovoPay’s smartphone leasing service available to distributors via Solaris’s PaygOps platform with the goal of increasing “access to digital technology for millions of unbanked people in emerging countries.” PaygOps is a system for companies that lease consumer products such as solar panels. The system helps track new sales, payments on ongoing leases and customer service requests. NuovoPay’s technology allows for phones to be locked and unlocked remotely based on the timing of customer payments.

Nitesh Bhalothia, NuovoPay’s head of sales, argued that the partnership will aid “in curbing the digital divide while making smartphone financing seamless and risk-free.”

NuovoPay, which has offices in Canada and India, is a unit of ProMobi Technologies, an Indian developer of software-as-a-service solutions. NuovoPay’s remote-disabling technology is based on ProMobi’s Scalefusion product. ProMobi’s other product is NuovoTeam, a business-oriented messaging system.

Founded in 2014, Solaris has developed pay-as-you-go solutions that have been deployed in approximately 20 countries, mostly in Africa.

Financial data on the firms are not available.

By Hasnat Aslam, Research Associate

Sources and additional resources

PaygOps press release
https://www.paygops.com/post/paygops-nuovopay-closing-the-digital-divide-the-paygo-way

NuovoPay homepage
https://nuovopay.com/

Solaris Offgrid homepage
https://www.solarisoffgrid.com/

PaygOps homepage
https://www.paygops.com/

Previous MicroCapital story on PaygOps
https://www.microcapital.org/microcapital-brief-paygops-enables-smes-to-sell-paygo-solar-receivables-to-investors/

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