Operator-agnostic mobile money transfer services Pata Express carves a niche for itself in Congo-Brazza and plans to launch Phone Page directory

While there is a lot of publicity made around mobile payment services launched by mobile operators in Africa (thanks to their very well-oiled PR machine) there is much less emphasis on mobile payment services launched by other organisations. During her recent visit to Congo-Brazza, Isabelle Gross spoke to Alain Ndalla, the CEO of Pata Express about their mobile operator agnostic mobile transfer service and other services that the company plans to launch in the coming 12 months.

Pata Express has started offering mobile transfer and payment services in Congo-Brazaville twelve months ago. To comply with local banking rules, Pata Express works in collaboration with a banking organisation and in their case, they have signed partnerships with micro-finance organisations. Their service is currently available through three different micro-finance organisations. According to Alain Ndalla, working with micro-finance organisations has thus far been mutually beneficial.

The partnership with micro-finance organisations has provided Pata Express with ready available routes to market and points of sales across the country. Pata Express offers to micro-finance local outlets a real-time accounting service that runs on the backend of the mobile transfer service. While in the past micro-finance outlets needed a couple of days to reconcile daily transactions which had occurred a couple of days before, they can now access a report of the daily transactions at the end of each day.

The Pata Express data centre located in Brazzaville monitors transactions going through in real-time. On the security side, micro-finance outlets have to go through a two-step logging process to connect to the Pata Express system. First the micro-finance outlet logs in the system and than via SMS the person operating the service identifies him or herself again.

To use Pata Express mobile transfer services, people have to open an account with one of the micro-finance organisations that the company is working with. After twelve months of activity, Pata Express has several thousand customers which is not bad considering that the total population of Congo is less than 4 million inhabitants. The company also plans to add more services like bill payments or salary payouts to the “virtual wallet” that they have introduced but their main development efforts are currently going into building a service platform called “PhonePage”.

According to Alain Ndalla, PhonePage will combine an application store, a market place and an information service accessible via SMS. The company is partnering with a local mobile operator and will officially launch the service next December. The PhonePage platform allows for example people or companies to create their own space where they can list the services and products that they sell.

A space or an entry in the directory is created via an SMS and queries to PhonePage are also handled via SMS. To test the service, I sent a query to PhonePage about Alain Ndalla. A couple of seconds later, I received a response via SMS with the following information“ passionate about technology, art, architecture and jazz”. The idea at the heart of PhonePage is to build a repository of useful local information that will be easily accessible from any type of mobile phone.

Combined together, PhonePage and Pata Exrpess have the potential to increase visibility to local services and further facilitate payments for these services. Today, Pata Express is the sole provider of mobile transfer and payment services in Congo but this situation is soon going to change.

Mobile operator MTN in partnership with Ecobank is planning to launch its portfolio of MTN-Money services in November. Others will follow and the next technical and financial challenges will be to build an environment that enables Congolese mobile customers to make transfers and payments across the various platforms.

The full economic benefits of mobile transfer and payment services in Africa will only be felt once interoperability between service platforms will be achieved. This will no exactly be music to mobile operators’ ears but let’s face it. It will need to happen sooner rather than later. 

The idea of combining an m-money transfer service with other useful day-to-day services is a trend to watch. You can listen to Kamal Budhabatti, CEO of Craft Silicon in Kenya talk about its ELMA product which shares some similarities with Pata Express and Phone Page.

This week on the BalancingActAfrica You Tube channel:

Richard Bell, CEO, Wananchi Group in Kenya on international fibre connectivity, local TV content for its Zuku bouquet and financing its vision:

Kamal Budhabbatti, Craft Silicon on its banking products and m-money payment product ELMA

Robert Aouad, CEO Isocel Benin on opening a carrier-neutral data centre in Benin

Arun Nagar, CEO, Spice VAS Africa on launching its African platforms and live streaming

Lance Dickerson, CEO, TIA Telecom on optimising African mobile networks

And finally, one from the archive. Herman Heunis on social networking with MXit in Africa before he sold the company to Vodacom last week

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