The City of Windhoek is exploring offering credit options for residents with prepaid accounts as part of its new City App, which aims to enhance city services by leveraging digital transformation.
The City of Windhoek’s Strategic Executive for Information and Communication Technology, Fillemon Neputa said the City App will soon accommodate account payments, sales of prepaid water and electricity tokens, and provide prepaid products on credit for customers who are low on cash.
“We have several projects aimed at enhancing the lives of our people. While making money is important, we also prioritise the social component of our business. Therefore, we are working on multiple projects in the background to achieve this goal,” he said.
Neputa likened the credit option to the Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTC) Taamba service, designed to assist consumers manage through the month or day.
“We’re going to do credit scoring based on your interaction with us. How you buy your electricity, how you buy your water, those are the functionalities that we’re going to put in the background. And then here you just put in a request and that’s it,” he said.
Eligibility for this service requires having prepaid services activated, after which it can be pushed for users.
He however noted the timeline for implementation is being finalised, with planning sessions scheduled for next week.
“This background work is already completed. It’s now just a matter of saying these are the timelines and then we push for it,” Neputa confirmed.
He added that the goal is to deliver these initiatives within the current financial year.
Meanwhile, to ensure payment compliance, the city plans to implement measures such as recurring payments based on bank cards.
“We were planning to request that you set up a recurring payment using your bank card. With your permission, you would provide us with your CVV code, and we would handle the collection through automatic transactions,” he said.
Meanwhile, one of the app’s future enhancements includes the automation of building plan submissions.
“Everything should be digital. So your architect draws your plan, then uploads it to our app and portal. Once that takes place, you receive an invoice on your app, and then you make the payment,” Neputa explained.
Currently, the app has over 2,000 users since testing began last August.
