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Zoho Unveils Early Access to CRM for Everyone, Zoho Apptic & Catalyst

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Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone, a new set of industry-first capabilities aimed at democratising CRM to all teams involved in customer operations activities.

The company also unveiled significant enhancements to its offerings for professional developers and app development teams. These include early access to new services within Catalyst, the company’s pro-code full-stack development platform, and the general availability of Zoho Apptics, an application analytics solution that enables developers to track the in-app usage and performance of applications built on iOS, macOS, Android, and other platforms.

“Businesses are looking for unified solutions that help them optimise for value, maximise their competitive advantages, and tap into new market opportunities amid tough economic conditions,” said Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria. “At Zoho, we’re focused on continuously deepening our current offerings and expanding others to serve business needs. Zoho CRM for Everyone, for instance, is the first true democratisation of the CRM paradigm and helps unify all customer operations teams onto the CRM to deliver better customer experiences. Likewise, the upgraded Catalyst and the privacy-focused Apptics solution work hand-in-hand to deliver an unmatched developer experience from concept to code, and deployment to analytics.”

Zoho CRM for Everyone

Zoho CRM is one of the top selling products in Nigeria. The product recorded a  60% YoY growth in 2023 in the country.

Zoho CRM for Everyone allows sales teams, the primary custodian of customer relationships, to communicate and coordinate with other customer-facing teams from a single place—the CRM application—instead of holding fragmented discussions. It enables account managers, for example, to pull in a solutions engineer to coordinate a product demonstration for a customer. A marketer can perform win-loss analysis for specific deals. A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies. They may all use different core applications for deep work but can now converge on the CRM for managing shared responsibilities towards the customer.

Besides opening up CRM access cross-functionally, Zoho CRM for Everyone also empowers every team to manage their own workflows autonomously within the corporate IT framework. The new capabilities stand to improve visibility for every stakeholder in the customer journey, mitigate gaps in coordination, reduce turnaround time, and improve the quality of the customer experience.

To make CRM for Everyone possible, the following capabilities have come together in Zoho CRM:

● Team Modules and Requesters: Under team modules, business teams can create their own team-level data modules (in addition to organisation-level modules) by themselves while being governed by IT teams. Requesters is a new user profile in Zoho CRM that allows a team member to raise a request for colleagues in different teams and track the request status.
● Refreshed User Experience: To enable this fundamental shift in usage, the interface of Zoho CRM has been redesigned for better usability across roles and functions. With this release, Zoho CRM is also making a major stride in accessibility with capabilities covering areas like vision, motor activity, and interactions.

New Custom App Development Capabilities in Catalyst

Building custom solutions out of a disparate mix of tools has consistently been a source of frustration for developers. Catalyst unifies pro-code development efforts and streamlines the entire lifecycle by abstracting away complexities, providing pre-built components, and offering a comprehensive suite of developer tools.

Catalyst’s newest offerings, available under early access, expand on developer logic, design, and delivery:

● Signals: Routes events from sources like Zoho services, third-party sources, or custom applications to handlers (like Catalyst Functions, Circuits, etc.) using topics and subscriptions.
● NoSQL Database: Allows users to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data while supporting diverse data types and scaling dynamically with high performance.
● Slate: A fully managed frontend platform that lets developers easily build highly customised interfaces that leverage frameworks such as React.js, Next.js, Sveltekit, etc.
● CI/CD Pipeline: Automates tests and builds for continuous delivery pipelines, streamlining development workflows for faster time-to-market.

Catalyst seamlessly integrates with the Zoho ecosystem and third-party applications, enabling developers to leverage existing infrastructure and data sources. The platform stands out with its transparent and cost-effective pricing model, empowering organisations of all sizes by eliminating hidden fees and offering predictable, scalable pricing.

Privacy-Friendly Application Analytics:

Zoho Apptics delivers an extensive digital analytics platform designed for every stakeholder involved in application development and management. The solution consolidates analytics across app usage, performance, user engagement, and growth metrics into a centralised console, then synthesises these multifaceted data streams into actionable insights presented visually in dashboards and reports.

This unified view empowers organisations to make informed decisions, optimise app experiences, drive user engagement, and fuel sustainable growth throughout the application lifecycle. Apptics provides multi-platform analytics support, covering Android, iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, iPadOS, Windows, React Native, Flutter, and Unity, with web analytics capabilities coming soon.

Apptics stands out by offering a unique capability to prompt Android and iOS users for app ratings and updates directly from the Apptics console. Integrated app store reviews management helps in streamlining the process of analysing user sentiment. Additionally, Zoho Apptics prioritises data privacy and security, exceeding industry best practices and regulatory compliance standards. User information is safeguarded behind encryption and access controls, ensuring analytics insights are leveraged responsibly without compromising individual privacy.

Pricing and Availability  

Starting today, early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone is available upon request for Zoho customers worldwide. Zoho will be releasing additional capabilities to CRM for Everyone over several weeks during the early access phase.

Catalyst offers a generous Free Tier that renews monthly, alongside options for a pay-as-you-go model and subscription-based pricing. The new features are now available for early access, and interested users can sign up by visiting Zoho’s Catalyst page. Apptics is globally available now and offers a free plan and a pro plan starting at NGN18600 per month, when billed annually.


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Ugo Onwuaso is an ICT enthusiast. He believes technology should be used for general good. He holds a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from the Lagos state University. Dear Reader, Your support matters. But we believe that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. That is why, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and finance and how they affect lives. Our incisive and analytical view of how technology news affects the daily life help individuals and organizations make up their minds. Quality journalism costs money. Today, we're asking that you support us to do more. Kindly support our effort to deliver technology and finance journalism to everyone in the world. Donate as little as N1,000. Bank transfers can be made to: UBA Plc 1017156876 Communication Week Media Ltd

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MTN Nigeria Unveils 21 Days of Y’elloCare to Empower Communities through Digital Tools

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MTN Nigeria today held the opening ceremony for the 2025 edition of 21Days of Y’ello Care, the company’s annual employee volunteerism initiative.

This year’s campaign, themed “Connecting at the Roots – Connecting Communities through Digital Tools,” will run from June 1 to June 21, 2025, and focuses on supporting communities that continue to face barriers to digital access and connectivity.

MTN Nigeria kicked off on Sunday June 1 with trainings across different locations in Lagos where staff of the company volunteered to delivered training in valuable areas such as digital marketing and personal branding and employability skills.

In line with the Group-wide campaign theme, MTN Nigeria is implementing a series of grassroots initiatives aimed at expanding digital inclusion and connectivity in underserved areas.

Planned activities include equipping schools and community youth centres with devices, digital literacy workshops, deployment of community Wi-Fi access points, support for digital entrepreneurship and the establishment of an all-in-one Y’ello Pods across the country that will provide a digital hub for learning and support financial inclusion.

Speaking at the opening ceremony held in Lagos, Karl Toriola, Chief Executive Officer, MTN Nigeria said, Y’ello Care matters to us because we’re a digital company and we’re operating in an environment where there are so many needs. At MTN Nigeria, we care, and we want to show our direct connection and responsibility to the communities we operate in.

Now in its 18th year, Y’ello Care is a groupwide flagship MTN employee volunteering initiative that encourages MTNers to volunteer their time and expertise to support positive social change.

The campaign reflects MTN’s purpose to enable the benefits of a modern connected life for everyone and is anchored in the company’s core values.

In 2024, in a remarkable demonstration of corporate volunteerism, MTN staff, through the Y’ello Care initiative, reconstructed a school block at Iwerekun Community High School, Lakowe. This effort has restored hope and significantly improved learning conditions for both students and teachers.

For further information, updates on “21 Days of Y’ello Care”and MTN Nigeria’s commitment to social development, please visit yellocare.ng or follow us on social media.


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Google’s Open Buildings Data Empowers Africa’s Health and Climate Progress

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Fresh, on-the-ground evidence from health planners and climate analysts in Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa shows how the Open Buildings dataset, which maps more than 1.8 billion structures, is helping frontline projects close service gaps and strengthen community resilience.

Across the continent, artificial-intelligence tools are graduating from pilots to public-service workhorses, powering everything from crop-price forecasts to live language translation. Open Buildings—developed by researchers at Google Research Africa—is part of that shift, proving that open, locally guided AI can turn sparse data into timely decisions without locking African problem-solvers behind paywalls or proprietary gates.

In Rwanda, the Ministry of Health and Kigali-based Sand Technologies resited rural clinics with help from the dataset. Their new blueprint aims to bring 92% of citizens within a 30-minute reach of care, trimming journeys that put mothers and newborns at risk.

Across Northern Nigeria, epidemiologists at AFENET and geographers from WorldPop uncovered 10,250 buildings, guiding vaccinators who reached 70% of the zero-dose and under-immunized children identified through the mapping in just six months.

Meanwhile, the World Resources Institute (WRI) has already applied this flood-risk modelling in Dire Dawa, Kigali, Musanze, Gqeberha and Johannesburg, combining two-dimensional hydraulic simulations with building footprints to create block-by-block exposure maps.

The need is pressing: Nairobi is still recovering from the May 2024 floods that displaced more than 278 000 residents, while Johannesburg’s rapid growth along the flood-prone Jukskei River continues to heighten vulnerability

These projects tackle challenges felt across the continent. Africa still has about 8.7 million “zero-dose” children who receive no routine vaccines each year, while the urban population is projected to almost double to nearly one billion people by 2035— forcing new homes into high-risk floodplains and informal settlements.

By giving ministries, city engineers and NGOs a street-level view of where communities are growing and how they change over time, the Open Buildings dataset lets limited budgets flow to the people and places that need them most.

Dr Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Research Scientist & Head, Google Research Africa, “These projects show what happens when local expertise meets open, scalable technology: mothers reach clinics sooner, children receive long-overdue vaccines, and city planners get ahead of the next flood.

“We’re thrilled to stand beside partners who turn data into decisive action, proving that AI’s highest calling is to solve real-world challenges.”

From lifesaving clinics to climate-smart cities, these projects show how open AI is fast becoming Africa’s quiet engine for equitable progress.

The Open Buildings dataset—along with sample code, tutorials and its new 2.5D layer—is freely available at g.co/openbuildings.


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Union Bank and PAPSS Revolutionize Cross-Border Payments

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To deliver simpler, smarter banking solutions, Union Bank of Nigeria has partnered with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) network, a Financial Market Infrastructure that provides hassle-free and convenient cross-border money transfers to some selected African countries.

This revolutionary payment solution for implementing the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is designed to transform how payments are made across Africa.

With PAPSS, customers can send money instantly to Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Djibouti, Nigeria and more African countries in the future.

Using PAPPS offers numerous benefits to customers, including, but not limited to, instant payments or transfers, cheaper foreign transaction costs, no need to source FX, enhanced security, and intra-African trade opportunities.

Commenting on this partnership that goes across borders, Peter Amadi, Head of Transaction Banking at Union Bank of Nigeria, said,
” At Union Bank of Nigeria, we are committed to driving innovation and excellence in banking. Our focus is on providing seamless and efficient banking through simpler, smarter solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers.

“We believe in fostering strong relationships and delivering exceptional value to our customers, ensuring their success in today’s dynamic financial landscape.”

Mike Ogbalu III, CEO of PAPSS, commenting on this partnership, said, “I am very excited and proud to see Union Bank of Nigeria, a bank with over a century of banking legacy, joining the PAPSS network.

“This shows how PAPSS will be a game changer for the continent by enabling infrastructure to spur the growth of intra-African trade and commerce, with the active participation of regional economic communities, private sectors, and other stakeholders.”

Union Bank’s partnership with PAPSS marks a significant milestone in the Bank’s commitment to driving innovation and excellence in banking.

By providing seamless and efficient banking solutions through simpler, smarter means, the Bank aims to meet the evolving needs of its customers.

This collaboration enhances the Bank’s service offerings, fosters strong relationships, and delivers exceptional value to customers, ensuring their success in today’s dynamic financial landscape.


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