The Kyivstar mobile communications operator has launched the Mobile ID service, allowing the digital identification of persons for obtaining e-services using the mobile number. According to a press release of the operator, the service is available in Kyiv, Dnipro, Ivano-Frankivsk, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytsky, Lviv, Zhytomyr and Cherkasy. In total, these cities have 22 open points for issuing Mobile ID SIM-cards and certificates from the accredited key certification center of justice authorities. They can be received by individual entrepreneurs, contract subscribers and corporate clients of Kyivstar from any locality of Ukraine.
“Now we are focusing our efforts on connecting the cities, which are regional centers. We have already covered 11 cities. In the beginning of 2019, we will announce the opening of new locations. And we will move further “deep countryside” to make Mobile ID connection available in small cities,” the press service of the operator said, citing Director for Business Development in the Corporate Market in Kyivstar Yevhen Krazhan.
The operator said that the project was implemented in partnership with the accredited key certification center of the judicial authorities, which is an authorized provider of electronic trust services. All points, where Mobile-ID SIM-cards are issued, have been duly certified, as well as the staff responsible for connecting the service to users.
According to Kyivstar, the large-scale implementation of Mobile ID will simplify the provision of services to the population by government and commercial institutions, eliminating the intermediary link between the source of services and the customer and, thus, reducing excessive red tape, queues and costs.
The Mobile ID service can be used to obtain electronic public services (driver’s license, car registration, residence registration, income declaration, voting and petitions, receiving social assistance); health care (medication, access to the history of the disease, monitoring indicators) and education (access to the website of the educational institution and personal account, distance education, receiving certificates, extracts). It can also be used for the financial and banking sectors (payments, opening/closing accounts, receiving references, insurance, loans); corporate market (login, workflow, VPN, mobility), for online purchases, auctions and other services.
To connect to the Mobile ID, a subscriber needs to contact the certified connection point with the original passport and identification code and replace the SIM card with a new having Mobile ID support for free.
In this case, the subscriber receives a free digital certificate of a natural or legal person for a period of one year. The cost of using the Mobile ID service is already included in the tariff plans with a monthly fee of UAH 225 per month, for other tariff plans it is UAH 50 per month.
The operator invites service providers to cooperate to jointly expand the online services available to the public.
Farvater Travel (Yuzhgorod) has launched the online package trip search and booking service, investing around $300,000 since the beginning of its creation, the co-founder of the company, Tetiana Pollak, told reporters during the presentation of the service in Kyiv. The service is based on the Online Travel Agency model and allows you to select the appropriate tour package from the list of parameters on the site among 29 million current offers of tour operators. “We the online service have not yet seen a payback. We need to grow another five times to become profit-making,” she said, adding that the company had already increased online sales five times in six months.
According to her, this year, with the help of this service, more than 1,000 tours with the cost from EUR 180 to EUR 4,100 (the average cost of one trip is EUR 1,170) were booked.
The company plans to increase the volume of the serviced part of the Ukrainian market of package tours from the current almost 1% to 7% in 2020.
The company sees the profit from the service according to the scheme, which is traditional for travel agencies – the fee from the price stated by the tour operator, Pollak said. “The company has been in the non-online market for a long time, it has a significant amount of sales, and because of this, we have the largest fee,” Farvater Travel CEO Andriy Shvets said. Travel Company Farvater has been operating since 2006. The first version of the online search site was launched in October 2017, and in December, the first customers appeared. The company is owned by Tetiana and Friedrich Pollak in equal shares. The charter capital Farvater Travel is UAH 20,000.
FARVATER TRAVEL, INVESTS, ONLINE, SEARCH, SERVICE, TRIP, YUZHGOROD
State-controlled Oschadbank (Kyiv) has launched the Apple Pay payment service, chairman of the financial institution Andriy Pyshny has reported.
“Oschadbank the fastest in Europe several months ago integrated Google Pay. It has already launched Apple Pay. The future is in smartphones!” he wrote on his Facebook page.
He said Apple Pay is based on security and confidentiality.
“If you add a credit or debit card to Apple Pay, the card number itself is not stored in either the device or Apple servers. You are assigned a unique account number for the device, while it is encrypted and stored in a secure mode in the microchip “Secure Element” of your device. Each transaction is due to the generation of a unique one-time dynamic security code,” he said.
According to Pyshny, to use the possibility of paying with an iPhone, it is not necessarily to have an Oschadbank card: just call the contact center of the bank and get an instant digital prepaid card. It can be connected to Apple Pay and they you can use the application.
According to the press release of Oschadbank, one can pay with Apple Pay in stores using iPhone SE, iPhone 6 and newer models, and also with Apple Watch.
Public joint-stock company Ukrzaliznytsia and General Electric plan to announce an official tender to service locomotives under the cooperation contract.
According to a posting on the website of the Ukrainian company, acting Board Chairman of Ukrzaliznytsia Yevhen Kravtsov at a meeting with President and CEO General Electric Transportation Rafael Santana on Thursday discussed some urgent issues of cooperation in upgrade and modernization of the locomotive fleet of Ukrzaliznytsia under the partnership contract signed early this year.
Ukrzaliznytsia and General Electric are preparing for the announcement of an official tender to service TE33A Evolution Series locomotives that will be delivered to Ukrzaliznytsia under the cooperation contract, the company said.
Ukrzaliznytsia also said that during the negotiations General Electric presented options for financing of next phases for the successful implementation of the long-term cooperation contract.
GENERAL ELECTRIC, LOCOMOTIVES, SERVICE, TENDER, UKRZALIZNYTSIA
Estonia’s startup Taxify, which designed a ride-sharing platform and first entered Ukraine in September 2016, has decided to re-launch the service in Kyiv and hope to develop in other large cities of Ukraine in 2018.
“The first launch of the service in Kyiv took place in 2016 according to the franchise agreement with Estonian entrepreneurs, and now the company will restart the project with its own local team,” the company said last week.
According to him, the possibilities of expanding the market and working in other large cities of Ukraine are also being studied.
According to Marcus Willig, CEO and co-founder of Taxify, the company has huge potential for growth in Ukraine. He said that over the past year the number of trips organized with the help of Taxify platform has grown 10-fold, and today more than 10 million people and 50,000 drivers use the company’s service in more than 25 countries.
To attract attention to the restart of the service, the company offers a 50% discount for passengers.
Speaking of competition, Taxify also claims to offer better relationships to drivers.
As reported, at the end of May 2018 Taxify reported that the company raised $175 million of financing and the company was valuated at $1 billion. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz-owner Daimler has taken a stake in Taxify in a funding round. Last year China’s Didi Chuxing, a rival of Uber, became an investor in the company.
According to FT, Didi also participated in the round, along with European venture capital fund Korelya Capital and TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus.
Daimler may roll the service into its moovel app, a step that would increase Taxify’s customer base by a quarter to 12.5 million.
Taxify was founded in 2013.
