In 2012 and 2013 Net 1 UEPS (Net1) – a provider of alternative payment systems – was requested by the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) to biometrically register all social grant beneficiaries and grant recipients issued special smart cards. This was done as part of the beneficiary re-registration process during that period.
Net1 performed around 11 million additional registrations in fulfilling this request, these falling outside of its normal monthly service fee. SASSA agree to pay ZAR 275 million in order to cover these costs after this had been verified by an independent party.
Today, Net1 announced that it has received this sum, recovering its additional implementation costs from the massive project.
Over all, 21 million social grant beneficiaries were re-registered. Using Net1’s biometric search engine SASSA has been able to identify and remove erroneous grant recipients from its system. This includes duplicate, invalid and non-existent recipients in the database. Thanks to this clarity of records approximately ZAR 3 billion has been saved per year now that the bad grants have been removed.
Further Reading:
Just recently, MasterCard named its work done with SASSA and its biometric records as a major boon in it financial inclusion initiative.
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