TAP (Tap and Pay)

Curtis Vanderpuije, Kodjo Hesse and team from expressPay Ghana Ltd. in Ghana will develop a low-cost, contactless device for merchants in developing countries to more easily accept and process mobile money transactions. They will design the device so it can read identifying information from merchants and customers using radio-frequency identification, and use unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to communicate with existing mobile money providers. Being contactless, it will speed up mobile money transactions, which currently take several minutes, and its simplicity will make it more accessible to customers. To encourage use, they will refund part of the cost of the device when a certain number of mobile money transactions are made per month.