Deon van Heerden was appointed Clickatell’s South Africa country manager and vice president of sales for the Middle East and Africa last April. Prior to this, he successfully launched the company’s UK sales office and achieved a foothold in the very mature European market in just 18 months
Van Heerden is an accomplished management consultant and successful entrepreneur with 12 years experience in a variety of large-scale strategic business transformation consulting programs, general management and operations.
He spoke to hilary okeke
Various Mobile Banking Technologies
There are quite a few types of technologies around; it depends on certain factors relating to which technology to choose. For something like SMS, it is still the easiest to deploy; whereby a user send a structured SMS to request for his account balance. But in my definition, that is just informational service and not really mobile banking. Again, it depends on your definition of mobile banking. Then you can move on to other types of technologies like WAP, which is a browser based technology on the phone. Here, you need to access the Internet to get to the website of the bank. It needs to be structured in a certain way. The uptake is relatively low from my personal experience in South Africa because users hardly ever use their phones to access the Internet. So, this is not a very popular solution. Something like Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) is more popular in South Africa. It is easier to use and is available on 99 per cent of all phones. It has a user friendly interface; it is secure and cost effective as well cheaper than the SMS solution.
Why Mobile Messaging is the Best Technology
Ease of use is a consideration; but there is also the point around availability. In South Africa, we have USSD availability from the networks, but in Nigeria you do not have it yet, and it is going to take a few months before it is available. Therefore, without the USSD option, you have to look at other options. There is the Java application on the phone. Again you need to have access to a SIM card and deploy the application on that SIM card. So, it is a somewhat complex process to deploy those technologies. But with the USSD based system, it works just like that.
Best Security Strategy for Mobile Messaging Platform
It depends on what transactions you want to run through your platform. If you want to do complex transfers on finance or emergencies, you need to have a secure solution. If it is just informational like balance enquiry, you do not need a strict security solution because if somebody intercepts that information, he cannot do anything with it. It is just a set of numbers which would only make sense to the accountholder. But when you start doing finance and moving money in and out of your account, that is when you need to make the solution more secure.
Revenue Share between Service Providers and Network Operators
In South Africa, we also do not get a big share of the revenue from the operators. These are technologies which they have spent millions of dollars to acquire, and I think they can charge for using it. The banking services that we see being deployed in South Africa do not use the premium right or the revenue share model from the operators, and we do not have revenue share issues in servicing the banks. When you start selling games, ring tones and wall papers via SMS and you use premium rights for shortcodes like you have here in Nigeria; that is when revenue share issues come to play. From my experiences in South Africa, revenue share from the operators are low and that is the same across the world.
Revenue Generation Model
There are two models here. Where revenue share sets in is when you have a premium service like the shortcode. So, the user pays some money to send a message to that shortcode. What then happens is that the operator pays the service provider some percentage of that money. That is what service providers have been complaining about. We sell our services to the banks and that is a whole new model for us.
Future Trends in Mobile Messaging
We are going to see various types of businesses deploying mobile messaging solutions. Many services will be automated via SMS as well. On the mobile banking side, you are going to see real mobile technology deployed to deliver services. Mobile messaging is definitely the first step in launching a mobile banking strategy. It is an informational type of service that is delivered via SMS because businesses may need to educate their clients. In access banking services via your mobile phone, you get feedback on transactions via SMS. Then comes the complex transactional one such as the USSD based service. There is definitely a place for SMS in mobile banking and mobile banking strategy. Here, SMS is a complementary service.
