By Africa.com | Created at 2026-06-15 11:57:18 | Updated at 2026-06-15 16:59:00
5 hours ago
By George Muhia, Head of Enterprise Business, East Africa at Infobip
Across Africa, financial inclusion is no longer limited by the availability of financial services – it is limited by whether people can reliably access and use them. The real battleground is the communication layer.
Financial inclusion increasingly succeeds or fails at the communication layer. It determines whether customers can reach, understand, and use what is available to them, regardless of device, connectivity, language, or digital literacy.
In essence, inclusion is about creating reach, clarity and continuity. It is not a technical exercise, but a strategy of meeting people where they are and keeping them connected throughout their financial journey. Designing for the communication layer means building experiences that work for everyone, not just those with smartphones or stable data access.
This challenge is significant. Despite major advances in digital financial services, about 350 million people across Africa remain excluded due to barriers such as limited connectivity, high data costs, device constraints, linguistic diversity, and varying levels of digital literacy.
Data-dependent digital services alone cannot solve this. Institutions must design journeys around the realities of African consumers, using the channels they already rely on, such as USSD, SMS, WhatsApp and voice.
Why single-channel strategies fail in Africa
An omnichannel approach is essential for ensuring equitable financial access in Africa. The continent is not a single market; it is a mosaic of 54 countries, around 1.5 billion people with vastly different levels of connectivity and digital maturity. Any single‑channel strategy will inevitably exclude customers, often at the most critical moment in their journey.
Consider what happens when a customer runs out of data mid‑transaction: a data‑only journey simply stops, and the customer drops off. This is not just a user experience issue – it is a direct loss of conversion and revenue. With an omnichannel strategy, the experience can shift seamlessly to SMS or USSD, preserving context and allowing the customer to continue. That adaptability is what prevents journeys from breaking the moment connectivity does. The same logic applies at every stage of a financial journey.
In practice, a customer might begin a loan application on USSD, receive updates via SMS, and complete verification on WhatsApp, yet it should all feel like one seamless experience, not three disconnected touchpoints. This continuity is what drives inclusion as it reduces drop‑offs, builds trust, and ensures that access to financial services is not dictated by a person’s device or the quality of their connectivity.
Channels like USSD, SMS, and WhatsApp each play a distinct, complementary role, with USSD acting as the “great equaliser”, SMS as the universal notification layer, and WhatsApp enabling rich conversational engagement. The objectiveis not to choose a single channel but to orchestrate them intelligently so every customer can move seamlessly across channels without losing context or momentum.
Unique challenges affecting banks and fintechs
Banks and fintechs face unique challenges when serving customers with unreliable or low‑quality network access. Issues such as unstable connectivity, shared devices and common SIM‑card swapping frequently break digital journeys and increase abandoned transactions. Without smooth orchestration across channels, the experience quickly becomes fragmented.
Security is another pressure point, as low‑bandwidth channels offer limited protection, forcing providers to balance simplicity with strong authentication and fraud controls. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and One-Time Passwords (OTPs) delivered over USSD and SMS enable secure verification even when smartphones or data connectivity are unavailable. Additionally, low digital literacy and weak recourse mechanisms, can erode trust, slowing adoption.
There is also a growing risk of over-reliance on data-heavy or single-channel strategies. Prioritising app-based channels without fallback options like USSD or SMS, can unintentionally exclude large segments of the population, leading to missed revenue opportunities, reputational risk, and even regulatory scrutiny.
In this context, inclusion is not only a social imperative, but a commercial one too. Designing for this environment demands lightweight, resilient, and secure experiences that work across diverse devices and connectivity conditions, while still meeting regulatory requirements.
Inclusion by design
For organisations designing inclusive communication journeys, inclusion has to be embedded from the beginning of the design process. If you design for a customer with a $20 feature phone, intermittent coverage, limited literacy, and a second language, you automatically serve the smartphone user too, but the reverse is rarely true.
In practical terms, this requires three clear design principles.
First, journeys must include non-data fallbacks by default, ensuring customers can continue even when connectivity drops. Second, communication should support local languages and simple, intuitive interfaces to accommodate varying levels of literacy. Third, experiences must be tested in real-world conditions, including feature phones and low-bandwidth environments, not just high-end smartphones. A customer who completes a loan application on a $20 feature phone in intermittent coverage is the benchmark. Everything else is optimisation.
A single orchestration layer, designed to manage, orchestrate, and secure autonomous AI agents, becomes essential as it allows organisations to dynamically route conversations across channels while maintaining context, compliance and continuity at scale. In simple terms, this acts as a central system that ensures a customer can move from USSD to SMS to WhatsApp without restarting the journey or losing information, building journeys that work reliably for everyone, not just those with the best devices or the strongest connectivity.
A blend of old and new
Within the next three to five years, the biggest shift is not likely to come from one breakthrough technology, but from intelligently blending old and new channels to match real‑world connectivity conditions. This will be the key to making financial services truly accessible, not just technically available.
Several converging developments will accelerate this shift. Low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity is already closing coverage gaps in underserved areas, while offline-first AI models are enabling language translation and voice interaction without requiring constant data. Increasing smartphone penetration, meanwhile, will gradually unlock richer messaging experiences across more of the continent. None of these trends delivers inclusion on its own – the opportunity lies in orchestrating them together, matching the right channel to each customer’s real-world conditions
Interoperability between mobile money platforms, banks and fintechs will also determine how seamlessly omnichannel journeys can flow across ecosystems – reducing friction at the handover points where customers are most likely to drop off.
Ultimately, financial inclusion depends on whether the communication layer is designed to carry people all the way through their journeys, not just invite them in. When access, clarity, and continuity are built into the experience from the start, every customer, regardless of device, data, or digital confidence, can stay connected and complete what they set out to do.
That is why financial inclusion is no longer simply a banking or technology challenge – it is fundamentally a communication challenge. The institutions that succeed will be those that design communication systems capable of reaching customers consistently across every stage of the journey, regardless of connectivity, channel, or device.
In Africa’s next phase of digital financial growth, the winners will not be the most technologically advanced – they will be the most reachable.
About Infobip
Infobip is a global cloud communications platform that enables businesses to build connected experiences across all stages of the customer journey, with AI as the driving force of innovation. Through a single, natively built platform, Infobip delivers omnichannel engagement, identity, user authentication and contact centre solutions that help businesses and partners overcome the complexity of consumer communications while driving growth and increasing customer loyalty. Infobip is focused on enabling and accelerating AI adoption as it continues its transformation into an AI-first company. Infobip’s technology has the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices in 6 continents connected to over 10k+ connections of which 800+ are direct operator connections. The company was established in 2006 and is led by its co-founders, CEO Silvio Kutić and Izabel Jelenić.
Recent award wins include:
- Infobip recognized as a growth and innovation leader in Frost Radar™: Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) by Frost & Sullivan (Oct 2025)
- Infobip ranked as the number one Established Leader in the Juniper Research Mobile Messaging Fraud Prevention Market report (Sept 2025)
- Infobip named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for the third consecutive year. In 2025, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision (July 2025)
- Infobip named among Top 75 in Fortune’s Europe’s Most Innovative Companies 2025, placing it in the top 25% of all listed organizations (June 2025)
- Infobip ranked as a Leader in the Omdia CPaaS Universe Report for the third time (April 2025)
- Infobip ranked an Established Leader in the Juniper Research Conversational AI Leaderboard (Feb 2025)
- Infobip named a CPaaS Leader for the third time in the IDC MarketScape (Feb 2025)
- Infobip named one of the top CPaaS providers in Metrigy’s CPaaS MetriRank Report (Dec 2024)
- Infobip named number one among Established Leaders in RCS Business Messaging in Juniper Research’s RCS Business Messaging Competitor Leaderboard 2024 (Nov 2024)
- Infobip recognized as the number one provider in the AIT Fraud Prevention market by Juniper Research (Oct 2024)
- Infobip named to Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (March 2024)
