More than a billion people depend on USSD-based services that fail at an alarming rate

Jess Shorland
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Published in
4 min readApr 14, 2023
A USSD transaction failure message that reads “Connection problem or Invalid MMI code.”

Everyday, more than a billion people use USSD services. They use it to pay electricity bills, buy groceries, check their voter registration, send money to their family, top up their airtime, and countless other use cases.

USSD has become critical infrastructure for many financial systems. It powers 94% of all digital financial transactions across Africa, offline payments for almost every bank in India, and Togo’s emergency cash transfers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite the importance and scale of this technology, the global network of USSD codes and services has not been documented or measured in any meaningful way. Since building Stax, an app that automates USSD financial transactions, we have gained more visibility than ever before into the breadth, depth, and reliability of this otherwise opaque global system.

It is wide and varied, it is often the only option, and it is unreliable.

A shallow internet that benefits everyone

While payments is one of the largest use cases, USSD is much more than just financial services. It is often the only way to access digital information, products, and services that otherwise require an internet connection. To date, we have indexed 1,068 unique USSD services across 68 countries. They span government services, social media platforms, payments, remittances, investing, agriculture, news, sports, games, education, insurance, and more.

Governments and businesses must leverage USSD to reach people. In many mobile-first markets where mobile data is expensive, unreliable, or simply unavailable, providing access to products and services through USSD is necessary to acquire and retain new users. Twitter and Facebook are among some of the largest and most recognizable companies that have enabled a USSD version of their product in the past to encourage growth. And more recently, many high-growth fintech startups across Africa have both a native app and a USSD option (e.g. OPay serves its users via its mobile app and its USSD code).

OPay advertisement listing USSD codes for Send Money, Buy Airtime, Withdrawal, and Deposit.

An unreliable USSD system is bad for everyone

After nearly two years of people automating USSD transactions with Stax, the data we’ve collected is alarming. In a sample of 33,743 Stax USSD transactions performed in Kenya in 2022, more than 50% failed due to a network error.

Graph showing network failure rates for Stax’s top 5 USSD services in Kenya. Absa Bank, CO-OP Bank, Equity Bank, and KCB Bank are almost always >50% failures. Safaricom M-PESA is the most reliable, typically failing only 10–20% of the time.

Results are similarly volatile in both Ethiopia and Nigeria, leaving people desperate and angry when they can’t access their money. When transactions fail, people aren’t told why or when the service will be working again. Banks, mobile money services, and mobile network providers issue apology after apology under a barrage of incoming support requests, likely increasing their customer churn after long periods of downtime. Their customers are told to just keep trying, and in some cases are even charged a fee for every transaction. For instance, the Central Bank of Nigeria imposed a N6.98 (USD $.015) USSD transaction fee in 2021 that is collected directly from customer’s bank accounts. People’s time, money, and peace of mind are wasted.

Improving USSD is necessary and possible

Everyone in the African fintech ecosystem will benefit from a more reliable USSD system. People rely on this technology to help ease the burdens of daily life. The public and private sectors rely on it to drive accessibility, inclusion, growth, and retention. Presently, feature phones still make up more than half of mobile devices across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Graph showing that by 2025, smartphones will account for 61% of total mobile connections in Sub-Saharan Africa.

And smartphone users are increasingly choosing USSD because of high data costs and unstable connections.

Graph showing a growing “usage gap” of mobile data despite increasing smartphone ownership.

Our evidence strongly suggests that a few critical improvements in the design, testing, and error handling across USSD systems can significantly improve reliability, user experience, and transaction frequency.

We will share problems we’ve identified and suggested solutions in a series of blog posts over the next several weeks. We hope that by freely sharing our findings and recommendations, the ecosystem might be better equipped and incentivized to improve this critical infrastructure that benefits everyone.

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