What it does
Customers dial one shortcode on any of Nigeria’s four major networks (MTN, Glo, 9mobile and Airtel) and can open an account, transfer money within the bank or to other banks over NIBSS, pay bills, buy airtime and data, manage cards, change their PIN, and instantly block their account or USSD access.
The hard part
USSD sessions are short and mobile networks are unreliable, so a session can drop halfway through a transfer. Each telco connects differently, over SMPP, SOAP or HTTP. And all of it needs banking-grade security behind a plain phone menu.
What I did
- Built a USSD gateway that connects directly to all four telcos, so one shortcode works across every major network.
- Kept session state in Redis, so menus stay fast and sessions expire and recover cleanly when the network drops.
- Protected every transaction with PIN checks, isolated encrypted sessions and full audit logging.
- Integrated the bank’s core banking APIs over SOAP and REST.
- Led end-to-end testing against live telco networks, through to production go-live.
Result
The platform went live in production across all four networks, so the bank’s customers can bank from any mobile phone, with or without internet.