No industry has been immune to this years’ social and economic changes, we saw grocery shops going online, restaurants closing and moving to doing delivery only, resorts and casinos all over the world shutting their doors, and the water sector is no exception. The events of the last few months have served as a harsh wake-up call for many businesses to go digital.
The recent launch of the Smart Billing app by Utility startup Hydrologistics Africa (HydroIQ) and Kenyan Water fills a gap in the market by making it possible to digitize water payments and billing. This game-changing app also enables utilities and property managers to set up metering and customer service online, without the need to replace their current infrastructure.
Bringing Transparency & Visibility
Water stress has become a subject of global importance as water accounts for a minimum of 11% of family income in the majority of developing countries and the availability still remains a big challenge. Due to unmetered consumption and leakages, almost 50% of the water supplied is lost before it reaches the consumers.
The core of this problem lies in the fact that 90% of the entire water infrastructure is still highly opaque towards consumers as it remains on offline payments and manual metering. That leads to scarce availability to households, unreliable supply, non-payments, high rates, and poor customer service.
The way HydroIQ is solving this problem is by bringing transparency in distribution and access to water by using online and mobile payments, but also data analytics and sensors to build smart water grids.
The digital potential has been present for many years now, but the trick was how to unlock it without compromising customer safety. This is precisely what the app by HydroIQ accomplished with binging full transparency in distribution and access to water across Africa. The first step in avoiding fraud and understanding the trends of global water demand is in making all the water data available, and that is precisely their goal.
Unlocking The Digital Potential
The average cost of a single data breach is near to $4 million, and the total cybercrime cost has already reached $2 trillion. When you look at the fact that Oklahoma’s wind-turbine facility can be hacked in less than a minute and that natural gas pipelines in Canada and the U.S. are targeted regularly, it’s obvious that utilities are in equal peril from cyber-attacks.
However, according to a Whitepaper byLink11, “Few industries rely as heavily on system availability as gaming and gambling, making effective protection from virulent web threats crucial.” In fact, the industry suffered 12 billion cyber-attacks in 2019 largely deterred by employing scalable cloud-based solutions. As such, leads by example with companies like HydrolQ taking inspiration from its secure payment solutions that work for the customer base in the water sector as well as they do in iGaming.
But at the end of the day, a large portion of the risk customers are exposed to during online transactions, is down to their own choices. Putting security on the forefront of its business plan, casinos.co.za suggests that when dealing with fast online transactions you should use trusted payment methods like Visa, Master Card, some e-wallet options like Neteller, or prepaid options like EasyEFT.
For the most part, being transparent about the risks involved and reminding customers to be cautious when dealing with online transactions, is good practice at most online industries, the water sector being no exception.
Earned Trust
The story of HydroIQ commenced as a VWNO project, the world’s first virtual water network operator, founded by Victor Shikoli and Brian Bosire in 2017. In 2018 it was voted the best IoT solution at the AppsAfricaAwards, it was awarded as the Africa startup of the year, and selected in the first batch of the Techstar Accelerator as the only African startup. The fundings followed, from Partech Ventures and Techstars, among the others.
All this shows that this SmartBilling app has earned its trust, and the mission HydroIQ follows is certainly going to attract even more supporters and customers in the future.
