Cape-Town —  May 20th, 2008 —  Significant change for Prepayment  Electricity Market in South Africa

Eskom’s National Prepayment Vending Platform using the Actaris Eclipse System went live with 3 National vendors across South Africa. The vending footprint is expected to grow significantly within the next few months. This system will be able to vend pre paid electricity on line and in real time to approximately 3 500 000 Eskom pre paid electricity customers, becoming the largest Electricity Prepayment Vending system in the world. This Solution will literally change the entire prepaid vending environment, and improve cash collection for the Utility and allow the consumer to purchase electricity any where at any time.

Among the numerous benefits for Eskom are the improved customer service, larger footprint of vendors and a consolidated database.  The new system also has advanced functionality to recover debt, and advanced interoperability features thanks to the XML Vend message standardization incorporating a number of real time interfaces to Eskom Financial and Customer Relationship Management systems. This infrastructure will not only significantly improve service levels to customers, but it will also eliminate the risk of fraudulent transactions through intrinsic, leading-edge security measures. Effectively Eskom will be able to centralize and consolidate its controls, management reporting and customer service through a seamless, countrywide prepayment vending solution, and will allow Eskom to rapidly extend its vending footprint to more remote areas in the country.

Damian Padachi, Project Manager from Eskom: “Online Vending introduces a step change to Eskom prepaid vending that will not only introduce benefits to our business but to our prepaid customers as well”.

Eskom customers will be able to purchase pre paid electricity tokens nationwide through various national point of sale networks managed by retailers and point of sale service providers. Due to the innovative technology and communications the system will also enable members of the informal sector to become vendors thereby creating employment opportunities and uplifting communities.

“Actaris is very proud to be Eskom’s technology partner to establish the backbone System Infrastructure that will be able to meet Eskom’s challenging requirements. This will significantly change the pre paid electricity market in South Africa and be a reference in the world of Prepayment Systems. This achievement confirms our leadership in Prepayment Systems”, says Christophe Viarnaud, Managing Director of Actaris South Africa.

Actaris was awarded the tender to develop and implement Eskom’s National Online Vending Platform in November 2006, which was then successfully piloted before being migrated into a full production environment. Actaris’ technology edge, understanding of the Prepayment Industry and development/Systems Integration capabilities were key to the success of the project.