TruTeq Wireless has recently won a contract with EBank, the first branchless bank in Namibia, to develop the EBank USSD menu. EBank’s customers use this mobile phone based menu to access their bank accounts by dialling *140*140#.
The project was delivered using TruTeq’s Menu Builder – an application front-end that allows the customer to design menus using a web-based graphical user interface. By taking care of the front-end, the Menu Builder relieves the application from the need to maintain and track USSD sessions.
In addition, the system can scale from a few transactions per second to thousands of transactions per second without any changes to the application design. Because the Menu Builder also takes care of the routing and failover between GSM networks, the application does not have to know or even care what each GSM network’s interface may be.
Says Tjaart van der Walt, CEO of TruTeq Wireless: “The aim is to provide application developers with a tool to integrate with many networks and deliver services quickly. A complete service or even just menu changes may be designed and be fully tested on a test platform before being deployed.”
According to Gerald Riedel, chief operating officer of EBank, the Truteq team delivered a high quality USSD solution to EBank within the tight timelines their business required.
“The professional approach of Truteq coupled with their in-depth understanding of mobile communication technology – and their user friendly and flexible product offering – has assisted EBank in successfully launching its state of the art banking solution and significantly contributed to EBank’s speed of implementation in the market.”
“The natural extension to the Menu Builder,” Van der Walt points out, “is to render the content for different delivery channels and we are pleased to announce that in addition to USSD, the Menu Builder can now also render and deliver content over WAP, HTTP/s and even mobi-apps. This means the application is developed once, but is accessible over different bearers.
“Users like the fact that the menus are familiar whether they use a mobi app or USSD.”
It is also possible to integrate the advanced security features of ValiPort into the system to help keep the bad guys away.
“We exceeded all expectations with the technology platform built and were able to go to the market well ahead of schedule,” says Van der Walt.
He says EBank is at the forefront with technology and appealed to a wider client base, including the mobile market – giving it an edge over competitors.
