The Challenge

With Mobinil’s great expansion in the Egyptian market, the implemented and functional payment system has reached its capacity limits in terms of number of users, in addition to the fact that the functionalities available for the different projects are becoming very limited using the current system. Another issue that was rising was that the IT department team had to maintain two systems that were handling the same payments issues, which was causing a lot of conflicts and overhead for the team.

It is for this reason that a decision to proceed with reformulation of these systems has been made and it was about time to unify those two systems and get a more powerful system that would support as well the new services that Mobinil wanted to introduce to its emerging markets.

The Solution

Based on ASSET’s well known reputation of creative solutions and successful project implementations, Mobinil was proud to assign this project to ASSET’s Professional Services Team.

After a careful study, ASSET Team came up with an ideal solution that would resolve the current systems conflicts, duplications, and allow Mobinil to introduce the desired extra features all along the way to support its ongoing expansions.

“Mobinil Payment Gateway” was the perfect solution. The payment gateway main function was to holds underneath it all the payment systems and channels. The payment gateway was divided into four main modules:

• Administrative Module: aiming to easily define and maintain all the system needed definitions like users & roles definitions, shops, chains & POSs definitions, items definition, system settings, …etc
• Payment Module: mainly to handle payments from Mobinil shops & Point of sales regardless of collection location, plus a variety of other functions including searching for specific payment, deleting payments & printing payments receipts
• Reporting Module: offering a flexible reporting module that has general reporting search criteria which differs according to user role and category. The result reports can be viewed from within Administration module or payments module, in either Arabic or English (depending on the logged in user settings) and can also be exported in the form of an Excel sheet
• Interfacing Module: unifying the interface with other Mobinil systems including LCS, BSCS, Oracle Financials and SDS for data retrieval and posting of payments data that can affect other systems

The new Payment Gateway was planned to process all the payments related to billing, products (handsets, SIM cards …etc.) and services (Roaming, international…etc.); as well as the gateway was planned to integrate with several other systems in the backend including: Billing, Inventory, Accounting and the system was equipped with an extensive reporting system represented in:

• Administrative reports: History of Changing Item Price, Chain activation information, History of Transferring Shop Users, Current Item Break Down definition …etc
• Clients reports: Balance, Bill Payment Statistics, Credit Status, Detailed Break-Down Taxation…etc

The Results

The first phase of this challenging project took about 12 month to build the system and start its implementation. Mobinil Payment Gateway started its full functions in Mobinil shops since the first of August 2006 and after the successful launch, Mobinil started the roll out of their dealers and Point of Sales using the Payment Gateway.

Mobinil’s Payment Gateway implementation resulted in:

• Providing a wide set of tools to monitor the payments in the shops and point of sales and an option to track a transaction’s history up to one year
• Reducing administration and manpower costs, as the system only needs one person for support and maintenance
• Major cutback in the system downtime that is necessary for installing new updates
• Online integration with Mobinil’s main system, while supporting the emailing system as well
• Dynamic scheduled payments posting to Mobinil’s main system
• Exporting all payment reports directly into MS Excel

Future Implementation:

Referring to Mobinil’s positive feedback with the current system implementation, ASSET team is preparing the plan for phase two of the project implementation that will cover the management of:

• Multiple companies
• VANs, Partnership and Franchise
• Offers and discount
• Automatic integration with GL
• Interface with new payment channel (E-Payment, banks, Post-office)