The high Internet penetration in some parts of the world has made it such that USSD could never be useful, and thus very little innovation has taken place on top of it.
Over the last few years, banks and other large companies have deployed their USSD applications at great cost due to the engineering effort and equipment required. Until very recently, individuals and small organizations could never even dream of building their own USSD apps. USSD stands for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data and supposedly it never got a catchy mainstream alias because it never really took off. More recently, banks and utility companies have started taking advantage of the protocol to build mobile banking and utility management applications all across the continent. Read more
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