Mobilitrix is looking to expand its services to the rest of Africa and plans to offer its mobile marketing solution to retailers and marketers in Kenya and Nigeria.
The marketing solution utilises unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to conduct surveys on cellphones.
Mobilitrix founder and CTO Andrew Cardoza says the solution is tailor-made for Africa due to the proliferation of cellphones in the continent, and the fact that it does not require mobile phones to be WAP- or GPRS-enabled in order to access the surveys.
“USSD is as old as general text messaging and is supported by all the major GSM standards,” says Cardoza. “Basically, there are no barriers to stopping people from accessing the survey using USSD.”
Cardoza says Mobilitrix will target companies in Africa which seek to get insight from their customers on the products they offer. He goes on to say SMEs will benefit from the solution because they will only pay for each survey that is taken, compared to paying an upfront fee.
“When you look at paper-based surveys, companies are paying for the questionnaires to be delivered to the people, then collecting the results and counting them. With our mobile survey solution, it's all done electronically and the results are captured on our system, which reduces the costs associated with such an initiative.”
USSD
First National Bank (FNB) mobile and transact solutions head of expansion and special projects Yolande van Wyk says USSD has also made it possible for the bank to develop mobile banking solutions for the greater continent.
The bank has said in past reports that it plans to expand its cross-border prepaid airtime solution to the greater Southern African Development Community region. The offering allows families in SA to buy airtime for people living in other countries where the service operates.
FNB is already leveraging its four million registered customers as a base for its cellphone banking expansion plans.
Related stories:
Absa hits million mark
FNB eyes prepaid solution for SADC
African innovators rewarded
Share