We may not have Netflix, but on-demand TV in South Africa isn’t in a terrible shape at the moment. Last month, DSTV announced that it is to make its Box Office app, which plays back movies over the internet, available to non-subscribers but for some that isn’t enough. After all, registering for that kind of thing is tedious, involves leaving your credit card details in the hands of a third party and opening yourself up to all kinds of marketing spam.

What if ordering a movie was as simple as selecting it on your TV then slotting your debit card into the side of your remote control to pay for it? It’d be a neat way of getting all the issues around billing down to a format familiar to South Africans no matter how au fait they are with technology, wouldn’t it?

Also, it would be something of a world first – and ABSA reckons it can make it happen by early next year.

Speaking at the Mobile Money and Digital Gateway conference in Rosebank this morning, ABSA’s head of card issuing, Willie van Zyl, said that the bank plans to develop its Pebble Payment dongle over the next year in two key directions. The first is to build a handset which doesn’t require a smartphone to operate.

Pebble, which was launched last month, is a card reader that plugs into the bottom of a smartphone – much like the famous Square, in the US – and allows retailers and the like to accept card payment using chip and pin or magnetic stripe and confirm the transaction over the cell network. It’s pitched at people who use pay-on-delivery couriers, market traders and especially at those who aren’t using any form of banking in their business at all.

One big problem, van Zyl says, is that the many kinds of merchant that are really interested in Pebble don’t yet own smartphones. The next version of Pebble, he says, will be an all-in-one handset that can operate autonomously. Even more intriguing, however, is the plan to embed Pebble readers in other devices.

van Zyl said that he’s already in talks with one satellite provider for licensing the technology into decoders and remote controls.

“We hope to have patents, distribution and the technology ready by Q4 2014,” van Zyl says, “And by early 2015 you’ll see some announcements in this space. We are very serious when we say that the experience of making payments [by cash] is about to disappear.”

South Africa lags behind much of the world when it comes to making electronic payments conveniently, van Zyl says, with just 170 point-of-sales (POS) terminals per 100 ooo people, compared to thousands in the US and Europe. 61% of all transactions in South Africa are still made using cash – despite the fact that high crime rates make carrying cash a problem for lots of merchants and customers.

Given that mobile payment technology is in use overseas – to a certain extent anyway – it may seem surprising that ABSA has gone to the trouble of developing its own system with Pebble, using local companies.

“‘Proudly South African’ is a very important thing for us,” he says, “We wanted this to be developed and built in South Africa and exported to the rest of the world.”