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Optimisation start-up sets sights on consumers

Bonnie Tubbs
By Bonnie Tubbs, ITWeb telecoms editor.
Johannesburg, 15 Sept 2014
CEO of Tariffic Antony Seeff says there is a significant market for cellphone bill optimisation services, in SA and globally.
CEO of Tariffic Antony Seeff says there is a significant market for cellphone bill optimisation services, in SA and globally.

About a year after launching cellphone spend optimisation services for corporates, local start-up Tariffic is setting its sights on the consumer market and plans to have an online offering soon.

The company - founded by Saicom directors Howard Sackstein and Leor Atie, and engineering lecturer Adam Pantanowitz in 2011 - aims to mitigate the complexity around choosing the most cost-effective cellphone package.

Up to now, Tariffic has been running corporate cellphone bill information through its software - developed by a team of engineers, programmers and mathematicians - and compiling reports that indicate the most efficient cellular contracts and bundles available, on a network-agnostic basis.

In the first quarter of next year, says CEO Antony Seeff, the company will have an online consumer offering available, via which consumers can submit their bills and, for a fee, get a report back recommending the optimal service provider and package, for their specific user behaviour.

Seeff says a partnership concluded earlier this year with Altech Autopage allows the company to now go beyond advising corporates - and soon consumers - to actually porting them to the relevant network too.

"This has been well-received, with about half of our corporate customers now with Autopage. It takes a lot of the headache out of trying to get monthly cellphone bills from service providers and allows us to offer a converged solution so corporates can use a combination of providers, depending on the offerings at the time."

Tariffic has also signed up four resellers this year, says Seeff, and plans to bring one to two more on board, per month, going forward.

Switch It, Mobi Warehouse, Intergrat and Fine Print are currently on board and Seeff says the company hopes to scale extensively through these and future agreements.

At the moment, he says, the resellers offer cellphone bill optimisation services, and are empowered to sell Autopage products - although the latter will only start to materialise in a few months' time.

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