Thorn Technologies helps Ongo develop an entire ecosystem of mobile commerce applications, powered by AWS
The Problem
The economy in Myanmar depends heavily on cash because the country lacks the banking infrastructure to facilitate credit cards and other forms of non-cash payment. Because of this, large piles of cash are often needed for big purchases, which caused many inefficiencies and financial errors for local merchants and consumer goods distributors.
At the same time, the country of Myanmar has seen significant upgrades across all three major wireless carriers. This has allowed the citizens and businesses of Myanmar to access the internet on smartphones with 3G or better speeds for the first time ever.
The combination of the big cash management problem and increased mobile internet accessibility has created the perfect opportunity to launch an innovative mobile payments solution, which Ronoc Asia Ltd has done with the Ongo mobile money ecosystem of apps.
The Solution
Ronoc engaged Thorn Technologies to build all of Ongo’s applications.
Ronoc created an innovative business model to make mobile payments possible, while Thorn Technologies developed all of the technology to facilitate the execution, management, and monitoring of these payments.
Thorn Technologies developed multiple Android apps for consumers, cash agents, vendors, and distributors to exchange payments for goods and services. In addition, Thorn Technologies created administrative software for consumer product vendors and distributors to manage accounting and financials.
The entire mobile money ecosystem runs on AWS.
- A high-availability, secure network architecture was built to maximize system uptime and security of sensitive financial transaction data.
- Multiple redundant databases were set up to prevent data loss.
- The entire software build and deployment process was automated to multiple regions around the globe to facilitate agile development.
- AWS technologies such as CloudWatch, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancer, Lambda, RDS, Route 53, and S3 were integrated seamlessly to power all of the applications.
The Results
Ongo officially launched in the city of Yangon, Myanmar, in September 2016.
The growth of the Ongo service has been robust. Within the first month of launching, there were under 4,000 total consumer users. By the end of 2016, that total grew to over 24,000.
The development of the apps led to a partnership with a global consumer goods distributor to use Ongo for all their deliveries in Myanmar.
Expansion to other Southeast Asian countries such Thailand, Singapore, or Vietnam is planned for the near future.
