“Why”, rather than “how'”, will become a key focus for next generation transactional platforms in 2019.
This is according to Kobus du Plooy, CEO of transactional platform provider Celbux, who says that, as digital banking solutions proliferate and mobile banking goes mainstream across the continent, key emerging trends in 2019 will include a shift toward disruptive virtual retail banking, increasing uptake of mobile as a transaction tool and the growing digitisation of loyalty programmes.
“But there are already graveyards of transactional solutions out there,” he adds. “The reason they didn’t take off, and the big challenge that faced transactional solution developers in the past was ‘stickiness’ – quite simply, they had limited optionality when spending at merchants without a card, so why should consumers use a solution in the first place?”
Du Plooy believes that to gain traction in the market and deliver real value to merchants and consumers, transactional platforms have to deliver a great deal more than just transactional capabilities, and they have to do so at a cost to consumer which is substantially less than current offerings.
“To be successful, solutions have to resemble cash as closely as possible – they must be device, communication channel and mobile network agnostic; and they must be interoperable across merchants, informal traders, P2P, B2B and B2C. But to be truly ‘sticky’, they should also offer value beyond what cash can deliver when spending at merchants.”
Adding value to transactions by awarding cash back and loyalty incentives gives mobile transactions a value higher than cash, he notes, and by further enabling an ecosystem that collates multiple transactional accounts within a single, seamless account overcomes the ‘why?’ issue that has hampered uptake of many transactional solutions and apps in the past.
The Celbux cloud-based transactional platform is an scalable, agnostic platform that allows customers to run accounts with real benefits to users. This allows them to offer competitive transactional services to end users, and it can do so across all devices, networks and merchant ecosystems. For consumers, the ability to earn and manage incentives, pay and transfer money in-country and across borders within a single account, at substantially lower cost, makes the new approach to mobile-based transactions a compelling proposition.