Financial Services

In Ghana many customers pay by mobile money, and many use phones without a data connection. A payments business has to serve both. USSD reaches basic phones, but a USSD screen holds very little text, so each step can ask only for what the purchase needs.

Payments also fail in untidy ways. A confirmation can arrive late or arrive twice, a customer can leave the menu halfway through, and a provider's callback may disagree with what happened. A system that trusts the first message it receives can hand over goods that were never paid for, or charge a customer twice.

Each provider, whether Hubtel, a bank or a mobile network, has its own approval process, test accounts and requirements, and that work can take longer than writing the code. Some businesses also arrive with a half-finished system from another team and need someone to complete it without starting again.

DialGH, built for a group of entrepreneurs, lets customers buy ECG prepaid credit, airtime and data and pay DStv bills from one dialled code. We built its USSD menus, backend, website and Hubtel integration, and kept each purchase short enough to fit the phone screen.

On ZoomPass, a transport payment app, another team had built the first backend. We finished the remaining work, coordinated the payment integration with GTBank and deployed the system, building on the existing code.

When we build a checkout, the provider's status check decides whether a payment succeeded; the callback on its own is not trusted. SuperLovek's mobile money checkout is built this way, and each paid sale is posted to the retailer's accounts exactly once.

The services that apply are payment and mobile money integration, USSD development and custom software.