Documentation and Glossary

Collection of money from consumers for the payment of bills or accounts for 3rd-party services. For example, payments of utility accounts, telecommunications accounts, insurance premium collections, etc. Expertron can develop interfaces to integrate Cell Power with 3rd-party systems to provide bill payments for 3rd-party service and product bill payments.

Agent

An individual who is already a merchant, but wants to recruit other merchants and earn additional, passive income as commission on their sales.

Consumer

An individual who wants to purchase prepaid vouchers for own consumption.

Denominated Voucher

An electronic voucher with a fixed value that can be stored offline in a database, and retrieved later on at the time of the sale.

Dynamic Recharge

Dynamic recharge refers to the mechanism of dispensing value electronically without vending a denominated electronic voucher to the customer. An example is PIN-less recharge for prepaid airtime, where a customer's prepaid cellphone account can be recharged by any amount specified by the customer without dispensing a voucher.

Electronic Voucher

A number that can be stored and sold electronically, and represents monetary value within the context of a commercial ecosystem.

Electronic Voucher Distribution

The process of distributing, or selling electronic vouchers.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, the language that is used to specify the layout and presentation of a Web page rendered by a Web browser.

IVR

Interactive Voice Response is an interface between a telephone and computer-based service using DTMF tones or voice recognition for user input.

Merchant

An individual who wants to purchase prepaid vouchers in a convenient way.

An individual who wants to resell prepaid vouchers on a small scale to family and friends.

A sole proprietor who wants to resell prepaid vouchers to enhance their existing business.

Online Voucher

An electronic voucher that is generated dynamically at the time of the sale, and is not loaded and stored offline in a database prior to the sale. Examples of online vouchers are STS electricity vouchers (or tokens) that are retrieved online (at the time of the sale) via the XMLvend protocol from the electricity utility's prepaid management system.

Operator

A private business or government entity that uses the Cell Power EVD platform to buy and sell electronic vouchers. The operator maintains relationships with suppliers of electronic vouchers, and resells these through a network of merchants and/or agents managed by the operator, or sells directly to consumers.

Retail POS Terminal

A dedicated Point-of-Sale terminal with built-in printer, typically used at retail outlets for transactions.

SMS

Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service that allows the exchange of short text messages between mobile phone devices.

STS

The Standard Transfer Specification has become recognised as the only globally accepted open standard for prepayment systems, ensuring inter-operability between system components from different manufacturers of prepayment systems. It has become established as a worldwide standard for the transfer of electricity prepayment tokens since its introduction in South Africa in 1993.

USSD

Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is a protocol used by GSM cellular telephones to communicate with the service provider's computers. A cellphone initiates a USSD call by dialling a number of the format, for example, *120*789#.

Virtual Voucher

An Electronic Voucher

WML

Wireless Markup Language, the language that is used to specify the layout and presentation of a Web page rendered by a WAP browser on a cellphone.

XMLvend

XMLVend is a South African developed, open interface standard, which facilitates the sale of prepaid electricity credit between electricity utilities and clients. It is an application of Web Services to facilitate trade between various types of devices and a utility prepayment vending server. This standard is already being introduced and used in prepaid water. Cell Power has extended the functionality of the XMLvend protocol to sell other types of vouchers, such as denominated prepaid airtime vouchers.