The One Way CEO: Shakir Ullah, CEO A2Z E-Payments

You hear a lot of buzz about using technology to bring about change, to impact the greater masses and to benefit the larger population. The purpose of technology, as you very well know, is to seamlessly integrate new, more effective and accountable processes into the existing fabric of the common individual's, everyday lifestyle. Like most other things, if the 'solution' is unfamiliar and uncomfortable, it will never be adopted.

"That's the first rule of developing a solution or product. Apply innovation to fill in a void you know exists in the traditional system," begins Shakir Ullah, CEO of A2Z E-Payments. "We develop SMS-based, Web-based and Electronic Point of Sale-based solutions and very recently, we have entered into an agreement with the NWFP Province where we have automated the traffic challan system and brought this project to life."

Based out of Peshawar, Shakir Ullah's company and visionary leadership brought to life one of the most inspiring projects: an automated Traffic Penalty System for the North West Front Province (NWFP). A test project first inaugurated in March of this year, has integrated a solution to increase the accountability and collection amounts accumulated by the Traffic Police.

Two years ago, the NWFP Government IT Department approached Shakir Ullah's company under the umbrella of former Government's initiative entitled E-Government, whereby they wanted all public sector institution revenues to be collected as e-Payments. "The local IT Department identified only a few problems with the current, manual system. Since there was only one bank which had only a limited number of branches, restricted banking hours and inefficient operations, the public faced issues because they couldn't file their penalties. Add this to the fact that there was a lot of miscalculation and no accountability because of manual record keeping, we were asked to try and resolve this problem for them."

The team went to work with only three parameters in hand: fine, penalty and amount. Everything else, was something they created. "We came up with a solution that would form a ticketing system in two parts whereby the frontend was money collection and the backend involved documentation and archiving. In the frontend, we introduced Point Of Sale terminals since merchants know how to use this, reducing the burden of training, and banks were familiar with the equipment."

As with any sensible solution, the solution that A2Z E-Payments deployed relieves a pain point identified by the organization. "If you don't document the activity, there is no accountability in the amount of collectables. We generated a system which could not only help to track the activity but also increase the accountability and integrity of Traffic Police." In the first week when the solution was deployed, there were 9,042 violations across 50 sectors, and Rs.1.194 million collected in a week. And because the numbers are documented, people are able to pay the penalty at any time, anywhere and all the system has to do, is tally the accounts.