Edgetech Solutions, a banking solutions company based in Zimbabwe has announced that it is testing a sound based mobile payment solution for point of sale transactions.

The product will enable customers to pay for goods and services by the use of sound without the need for internet connections or near field communication (NFC) technology. The service will be provided in partnership with NearBytes and will be named EdgePay.

Specials apps will be loaded to the POS system and the customer’s mobile phone.

The purchase details will then be transferred to the customer’s phone through sound and then the customer will approve the purchase. The POS system will then verify and generate a receipt. This service will bring the near field technology-like service to all mobile phones.

The company says that there are some banks in the country that are already interested in the technology, with financial institutions becoming their target customers for the POS system.

“Sound can do so much more in the hands of forward thinking people; talk about thinking outside the box or parallel thinking (as some would want to put it). The integration APIs for NearBytes are quite straightforward and easy to use, and the NearBytes team offer great support. I was impressed by the commitment the NearBytes team showed whenever we required support during the integration with NearBytes,” Wilson Tawodzera, Edgetech Consultancy managing director said.

“We expect this product to be quite popular, because the use of sound to transfer data does not require special hardware apart from a speaker and microphone. Banks have been eagerly waiting for a way to utilise the mobile phones to make payments across different platforms,” he added.

Tawodzera said that they aim to expand the new POS system to include things like ATM and e-commerce payments, while making the pricing in the market competitive. The demo for this payment can be found here.