Using USSD to Provide Financial Inclusion in Nigeria — OPay
In 2012, Nigeria created the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS) that targeted to have Nigeria achieve 80% financial inclusion by 2020. While they are still making good progress on that front, they are yet to reach their target. Fintech firms are rising to the challenge and supporting the government by building solutions that push this progress. This is through providing accessible and affordable methods for people to move money across the country.
One such company is OPay. They have built an agency network of more than 300,000 agents who are providing last-mile access to payment solutions across the country. This has seen them recognized by different venture capitals and investors which lead them to raise a combined 170 million dollars in 2019 for the Series A and Series B funding rounds. The investment has enabled them to expand their network as well as providing new product verticals.
We had a short interview with them to know how they are using our products to provide access to the different unbanked and underbanked populations in Nigeria.
- Introduce your company and what it does.
OPay is an on-demand multi-service platform and mobile payment technology company. With an underlying payment infrastructure, we are able to combine all aspects of a consumer’s needs into a single platform and service them. OPay launched its application in 2018 as a mobile payment app, and since then we have transformed into a Super App, providing more than 12 core services.
2. How did you discover Africa’s Talking?
Our unwavering purpose from day one has been to focus on creating affordable, easy-to-use financial service products with the goal of helping our customers improve their financial lives. And we struggled with delivering on time and efficient communication to our customers from day one.
We struggled because our initial partner struggled with service uptime, business insights and most importantly around the clock support to our engineers.
We quickly realized that we needed a technology partner like Africa’s Talking that could integrate seamlessly across our stack and help us grow quickly using critical insights and high availability. A member of our operations team started searching and quickly found out that Africa’s Talking could meet all of our business requirements and even do more. From there we never looked back!
3. What problem were you looking to solve?
High service availability was a major problem we wanted to solve, we are a payment company first and we needed to guarantee that customers got transactions and authentication messages on time. It was simple for us, if we couldn’t solve this problem we will fail.
4. How did we stack up against the other solutions you were looking into?
Other vendors wanted us to pay an extra cost for a personalized support experience, Africa’s Talking made it clear from the get go that they were with us through thick and thin and had our back. If we needed their engineers on support, they were with us in a matter of minutes and we had access to their support team on demand.
The first time AT had a downtime after a long time it was like it never happened. They handled it transparently by retrying failed operations. This meant that our support team didn’t have to deal with customer complaints and we were informed beforehand as well.
AT also provides important business insights through their robust dashboard. At a glance, we could see critical data and insights, access transaction data all in one place. During our meetings with them they had dedicated a full session to help us save cost by leveraging important API’s like phone number lookup for blocked numbers or unavailable lines. It helped us save costs in the long term.
5. Which of our products do you use and what solutions have you come up with?
We rolled out our USSD platform leveraging AT’s USSD infrastructure in a matter of weeks. As a payment company reaching the unbanked population is very important to us and with AT’s help we were able to reach rural areas and onboard customers that for months we cracked our head around different acquisition strategies.
6. How has your experience been since you plugged into using our APIs?
Our engineers can now sleep at night knowing that they won’t have to be up fixing problems with our SMS or USSD service. We are also grateful for the timely service notifications that help us plan ahead.
7. What has our products enabled you to do? — the benefits since integration
Continent-wide reach with communication running smoothly on AT. OPay can now focus on leveraging the technology to keep expanding and moving forward — wherever we want to go next. In our go-to-market strategy, building or integrating communication services never come up because we already did the work required.
8. Why would you recommend this for someone who might be interested in integrating?
High availability is critical to any business at least if you are looking towards exponential growth. AT provides all of this at an affordable cost that doesn’t bite at your margin.
Africa’s Talking is a Pan African tech company that works on helping developers in Africa make their ideas come to life with ease. We do this by giving them access to communication and payments infrastructure through easy-to-use APIs.
Want to explore our APIs? Learn more about us, reach us at info@africastalking.com and join the conversation on Slack!
