Get your Money from Your Customer's phones - let them pay you by dialing a code

Letting your customer pay you from their mobile phone is another way to ensure there are no excuses in paying for your products and services.

From the mobile phone, a customer can pay through their bank mobile application and bank’s USSD.

For clarity, USSD means Unstructured Supplementary Service Data. It is a communication technology that is used to send texts between a mobile phone and an application software. It enables a customer to dial a code on their phone as if they are making a phone call and receive instant response.

E.g. to pay for DSTV if you have GTB account, dial *737*smartcardnumber#

Having looked through some of the available services in Nigeria today, read on to see our review of these services and how you can start using them today in your business

USSD provided by Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBBS) a.k.a mCash

About NIBBS. Read more here

This service is very seamless.

To start receiving payments with this service, you need to 1st create your seller code.

Step 1: Dial *402#, and select option 3 which is to Enrol as a Merchant

Step 2. Enter your bank

Then you will be asked for your bank.

As at the time of writing, only Sterling bank and Polaris bank were my available banks where I have accounts. However, all the banks are involved and you will see your bank when you try to pay someone or register.

See mCash form I obtained for a client from zenith bank.

Step 3: Enter your date of birth

Then you input your date of birth in the ddmmyyyy format

Step 4: Provide your phone number

Finally your phone number linked to that account will be required.

Step 5: Welcome to mCash

You will then receive an sms welcoming you to the service and providing your seller code.

To pay someone, just dial

*402*sellercode*amount#

e.g. to pay me N1000, you can dial

*402*40211569*1000#

This doesn’t work use the following method:

Step 1: dial *402# and choose option 1 which is to pay someone

Step 2: Enter the seller code of the person you wish to pay

Step 3: select bank

Step 4: enter date of birth

Step 5: enter the amount you want to pay

Step 6: Create a pin to confirm the payment (or enter pin if you are already on mCash)
You will see you name and the amount you want to transfer including the name of the person you want to pay.

Once you enter the pin, the payment is sent instantly and you get an sms alert from your bank. Depending on your bank, you may be asked to insert the last 6 digits of your ATM card as pin for the transaction. Keep your atm card SAFE

In this screenshot, I just paid myself from my account.

USSD provided by Interswitch Ltd.

About Interswitch. Read more at ….

Interswitch provides USSD using *322#

To register to start receiving payments through Interswitch you have to usually go through a rigorus integration process which is not free of charge.

Once you are integrated, you now access to the payment channels.

If a customer wants to pay you through interswitch USSD, he will take the following steps

Step 1: dial *322# and choose option 4 to make a payment

Step 2: Choose Other

Step 3: You will be asked to enter bill payment code. This is a code generated by you and given to the customer to use to make his payment.

Step 4: after the code is entered, depending on how the integration was done, you will be asked to choose how to pay.

Interswitch has two options. 1 is to pay from your Interswitch wallet. This means that Interswitch has a wallet where people can register on and deposit money so that when they want to make USSD payments , they can pay from their wallets (see option 3 from step 1 above). The 2nd option is to complete the payment at quickteller.com using your bank ATM card.

This a bit stressful hence the service from NIBBS is preferred here.

USSD provided by Banks

Almost all the banks in Nigeria provide some sort of USSD service or the other

However very few will give you a code that any customer can dial to pay you. Even the ones that do, will require that the customer have an account with the bank which makes it restrictive.

As a business owner, take this step and provide another payment channel and ensure that your customer pays you. You can check out the mCash details here

If you would like to integrate mCash into your applications e.g. you want to authenticate customers 1st before payment ie if you have registered customers, you can contact us.
Integration for mCash costs N100,000.00. which includes a customized payment and reporting portal, automatic payment confirmation and receipt issuing for your customers.

If you have not read our article on why your business needs to start receiving payments online, click here to read it now.

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