Unstructured Supplementary Service Data

What does that entail? That really entails our digital channels.

That's across the apps, the web, and also the USSD channel.

We also look at digital products.

Digital products meaning what are we layering on this channel so that then the channel is useful to our customers.

Am I able to stop a check? Am I able to...

So there's a lot of things we're saying, can we digitally enable our customers to move them from the branches into the digital channel? And really our frontline team being central to that, because even when you walk into the branch, we are relying on them to educate our customers and say, did you know that this is actually available on your app or on your channels and you don't have to come here? Another thing we did is with the expansion that we have of our branches going into the different counties, the different counties out there, these areas where apps are not the first thing you use.

I mean, even Safaricom today are still trying to move people into the M-Pesa, using one app for M-Pesa, but many people still use USSD.

So we've done a lot of work on just getting back our USSD channel capabilities.

You didn't even need internet access.

No, it ran on USSD technology.

Basically, the same protocol you use to check your remaining phone credit with a short code.

You just took physical cash to a local corner shop, the shopkeeper credited your phone using a code, and then you texted that digital value to someone else.

so yeah i mean so we in 2020 we'll do it it's going quite well but i realized that it's also too early too early in the sense that people still want to talk to human beings right like people still want to feel like somebody is attending to my exactly so chatbots um it worked a bit well but i wasn't working too well i wouldn't say that was our biggest revenue or money maker right but i got a chance to do some work with some insurance companies unfortunately their banks they didn't allow us to they still went to indian companies sadly but i don't know that because they didn't trust what we're doing or because it was more advanced there so they trusted that but I had a strong feeling.

I remember I told my colleagues in the office about chatbots, the same I had about USSD.

So before USSD became a thing, like the way we see, almost everything has USSD now.

But I think when I was working in the bank at the time, USSD, there wasn't anyone doing USSD in the banking infrastructure.

and my bank was the first the bank i worked for was the first bank that did that and at the point when we're doing i had like a strong conviction that this thing made a lot of sense and soon every bank every insurance company would have

that

Android 17 QPR2 introduces new security restriction on programmatic call forwarding to protect users from fraud.

The system now persists and selectively restricts call forwarding USSD codes such as star 21 pound executed using the telephony management underline send underline USSD request API.

Two, API restriction.

The SendUSSDRequest API is no longer accessible for call forwarding codes using only the call underline phone permission.

Standard apps attempting to execute these codes in the background will be blocked and receive a USSD underline error underline not allowed callback.

3.

System confirmation.

To combat social engineering scams, users manually dialing call forwarding codes in the system dialer will now see a new OS-level confirmation dialog before the command is executed.

It's based out of Afghanistan, founded originally in 2016 as a digital wall to help bring more humanitarian payments into Afghanistan after the banking sector collapsed following the Taliban retaking control.

It works on iOS, Android, USSD, which is essentially like texting.

You might see this with...

Things like mobile money, where you text in to load up your card or something like that.

It uses blockchain as the plumbing, but that's not the feature that's front and center here.

Hardware also sets your UX ceiling.

So the use of USSD technology, which is common in mobile money to kind of reload your balance and those sorts of things, It wasn't a compromise, but it was really an intentional decision because they wanted to reach as many people as possible, even those that didn't have an internet connection.

They might have to be connected to a mobile network, but they don't have to have Wi-Fi or data to be able to use it.

And there's stats that we can check out.

So most people are, that's why USSD campaigns have become very key.

and SMS campaigns where people get, when you're doing a certain campaign, you get messages, you can get a service through a USSD prompting.

That's interesting.

So text-based marketing is very big.

And, you know, while I, I was at Afrika's Talking, I got to see, like, the potential of mobile technology and, you know, around the time M-PESA SDK Push API was, was coming up and, you know, I got to see that, like, hey, it's the same technology just being repurposed for, uh, payments, and I got fascinated by that idea.

So, um, towards mid-2019, I left Afrika's Talking and joined, uh, an American business called Hover, and they were building a software development kit for Android developers to integrate, uh, mobile payments using USSD rails.

That was, I think, a little bit early, much ahead of its time, but we had, like, lots of interesting use cases, um, from about 40 countries worldwide.

And again, I was leading, uh, global BD.