USSD Gateway

mkapuza

Summary

Creation of an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) gateway to allow the unbanked to access the Stellar Network.

Goals/Timeline

These are ongoing, will check off as accomplished. We are relatively new to the Stellar community and per Zac’s post, I’d like to get this up ASAP to get feedback from the community. In the meantime, we’re working on the more technical details of the implementation and demonstrations to make the proposal more clear.

[x] Mock ups of UI (1 week)
[ ] Design of API, reach out to: (2 weeks)
- [ ] Nodle
- [ ] Luwa
- [ ] YellowCard
[ ] Feedback from community (ongoing)
[ ] Completion of local partnership (4 weeks)
[ ] MVP build (6-8 weeks)
[ ] Pilot for remittances (12 weeks from start)

Description

We have 5 years of experience in the development space and noticed a gap in the Stellar ecosystem. USSD allows normal “feature phone” users (think Nokia) to access complex services through a menu option. This is how the majority of mobile banking is done in Africa. In order for Stellar to achieve its goals of financial inclusion and banking the unbanked, we need to create access through mobile networks, rather than via internet access.

We have had preliminary discussions with government officials at national and regional levels. Per our correspondence with the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), the issuers of CFA Franc currency:

There is a problem generated by the lack of physical coins and small denomination notes during transactions, be it in towns or villages – villagers in Africa conduct microtransactions in their daily life, not in a hypothetical streaming service environment
Access to the internet is limited for the majority of the population (20.0% for Cameroon). Therefore existing solutions, such as iOS / Android apps and APIs, do not and will not work for the foreseeable future Africa!
The majority of the population has a normal mobile phone (call and SMS reception/emission only), but smartphone penetration is not yet widespread (69.09% of Cameroonians have a mobile phone subscription). This is typical of Africa.
Many mobile phone clients don’t have a bank account (the rate of person having a bank account is about 20% of the population in the Central African States.)

Based on this information, it is clear that in order to bank the unbanked we need to create an access point to the Stellar network for feature phones. The way this is done in Africa is through a USSD gateway!

We are proposing creation and registration of this gateway.

Links

https://alliedcrowds.com
https://github.com/AlliedCrowds

Scopuly

mkapuza Hey. Your intentions cannot but please the Stellar community, because your contribution makes Stellar more popular and shows people that it is not necessary to wait until Telegram launches its TON and that Stellar is now ready for growth and real applicability, unlike all these many concepts.

The only thing that seems unrealistic to me in your project is the implementation timeline. I think it will take you much more time to implement your plans. But in any case, success and inspiration.

mkapuza

Scopuly Thanks for that! Good point regarding the timeline, it is definitely ambitious. Funding from the SCF will allow us to direct a lot of our internal resources to this project, so it will expedite things quite a bit.

mkapuza

Mock ups are ready! For a lot of you this is your first time seeing a USSD menu. If you have never seen or worked with USSD this will give you a much clearer idea of what we're doing. USSD is not a smartphone app! It is a text message interface that allows "feature" (or dumb) phones to do sophisticated transactions! This is how the majority of mobile banking is done in the world's poorest places, since they do not have internet or banking access.

Feedback welcome:

USSD Initialization

Menu Screen

Currency Screen

Balance Screen

Menu Screen

Recipient Screen

Balance Screen

Select Currency Screen

Recipient Screen

Send Payment Screen

Currency Screen

OrbitLens

There were multiple attempts to onboard African countries with the SMS gateways (USSD is slightly better from the usability perspective, but still it's almost the same):

Unfortunately, some of these services are not operational right now, some pivoted.
It seems to me that you need to find user base first. Also, check other projects – maybe you'll find open sourced code that will save you tons of work.

mkapuza

OrbitLens That's really good feedback! I will reach out to these groups to figure out more specifically the issues they faced. Great call on open source code too.

As for a user base we're working on that in the background and are confident that we'll have a solid base. We're well positioned for a grassroots approach based on our field work, but plan on doing a pilot either with a major development organisation or central bank.