Digital payment solution Street Wallet is helping car guards across South Africa to increase and sometimes even double their daily income in an increasingly cashless society, the Sunday Times reports.
Street Wallet offers customers multiple ways of paying, including Scan to Pay using a quick response (QR) code, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, SnapScan, and Zapper.
Andre Ilunga, a car guard in the Camps Bay area in Cape Town, told the Times that everything has changed for him since he started using the app.
Because most people did not tip him due to a lack of cash, he now makes nearly double what he would typically have made in a day.
So true, I often don’t have cash, or have a negligible amount as it costs money to draw cash, and I must make a special stop somewhere to get cash. Just about everything today accepts a card or online payment. I probably only draw some cash about three times a year, and that usually goes for card guards over a period of time.
Even domestic workers today, and garden services, accept EFT or other payments. We’ve had more than one domestic worker in our suburb get robbed of their cash at month end. It’s not really safe to carry cash, and cash is actually pretty filthy to handle (hygienically-wise). I suppose some will comment that is why cash gets laundered 😉
The app being mentioned in the article does not require the car guard to even have a bank account — they get a digital voucher that can be exchanged for cash at a bank (one hopes that they can receive their funds electronically too though as an option).
But what is of extreme concern, are some stats given in the linked article about how few people actually have access to the Internet from their homes, and in rural areas it is almost non-existent. This is a major stumbling block to a digital economy.
At R85 per gigabyte, mobile data prices in 2022 were three times as high as in North Africa and double the price in Western Europe, according to the report.
See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/banking/561682-car-guards-going-cashless.html