The customers everyone else designs out

Open almost any payment product’s onboarding and the first assumption is a smartphone. The second is a data bundle. Neither is stated, because neither is noticed.

In much of the region BitriPay serves, those two unstated assumptions exclude most of the market.

The decision nobody writes down

A product that requires an app has decided who its customers are. Not deliberately — nobody held a meeting about it — but the decision is made and it is permanent.

The people excluded are not an edge case. They are the trader with a feature phone that lasts five days on a charge, the grandmother receiving money from her son, the rider whose data ran out on Tuesday and whose next bundle is Friday.

They have money. They need to move it. They are not served.

Same account, different door

USSD is the point here, and the point is worth stating precisely: it is not a reduced product.

The same account. The same ledger. The same limits. The same transaction PIN that guards the account in the app.

The menu is shorter because a feature phone screen is shorter. That is the whole difference. A customer on a feature phone is not worth less and does not get less.

Dropped sessions

USSD sessions drop. The signal goes, the operator times out, somebody walks behind a wall.

The question that matters is what happens to a payment that was halfway through. The answer is that there is no halfway: the posting either happened or it did not. Check the balance and the last transaction and you will know which.

This is not special handling for USSD — it is what a balanced posting on a single ledger gives you for nothing. A payment that cannot be half-written cannot be half-written over a dropped session either.

SMS, for when even a session is too much

Some places have a signal that carries a text and not much else. A command can be sent by SMS for exactly those places.

It is the least elegant channel in the product and occasionally the only one that works.

And the smartphone owner with no data

Worth saying, because it is easy to think of this as a feature for other people.

A smartphone owner who has run out of data is, until Friday, exactly the same customer as somebody who has never owned one. The door that exists for one of them serves both.

What it costs

The operator charges for the session, as they do for any USSD. BitriPay adds nothing for using this door rather than the app.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• USSD and SMS reach the same accounts, the same ledger and the same limits as the app — not a parallel system with its own balances.
• The transaction PIN that protects the account in the app is the PIN that protects it over USSD.
• A session that drops mid-flow does not leave a half-made payment: the posting either happened or it did not.
• The command channel is simulated in the console, so a change can be tested without a handset.

What it costs

Operator charges for the session apply as they do for any USSD. BitriPay does not add a charge for using this door rather than the app.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: USSD and SMS on the features page.

Read next

• BitriPay Lite — Works on the connection you actually have.
• Offline payments — Trade when the network is gone.
• Agents and cash — The last mile is a person.