By Chris Moore, Nam Pham, Mauricio Castaneda, Dominique Friedl, Jenny Jin
In rural areas in Africa and Indonesia, our users who are financing a smartphone with the PayJoy Lock might experience a poor user experience if they are not able to update their device once they’ve made a payment due to lack of 3G/4G/LTE network coverage.
This will differ from country to country but some of our clients estimate that 70% of their customers live in rural areas with poor connectivity. In GSMA’s 2018 Mobile Connectivity World Index, most of the markets that PayJoy operates in LatAm, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia have low to medium LTE coverage at best.
Introducing Unlock Offline
Our new Unlock Offline feature allows users to enter a code into the PayJoy app that will update their amount of credit and keep their phone from locking, no internet necessary. This feature is core to our social mission of enabling the world’s underbanked to access credit by designing with their contexts in mind.
A quick overview of the Unlock Offline feature
1) Via Lock API, a PayJoy partner requests a code for a customer who is currently offline.
2) The client sends the generated code to the user by a phone call, SMS, or other user-accessible way.
3) After receiving the code, the user enters it in the following dialogue box that appears in their PayJoy app’s home screen when we detect that the phone is offline.
For security measures, we accept 5 attempts daily per user’s device and will monitor any suspicious fraud activities.
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