USSD Betting Platform

The challenge

Across much of Africa, a large share of players use basic feature phones or don't have reliable mobile data. A web or native app can't reach them. Every GSM phone, though, supports USSD: the *123#-style menus operators use for balance checks and top-ups.

USSD is a hard medium to build a betting product on:

• Tiny screens. Each menu holds only a short block of text, so a full match offer has to be paged and abbreviated without losing meaning.
• Short-lived sessions. The operator ends a session after a timeout, and any network blip ends it too. A half-built ticket must survive that.
• Money on the line. Deposits, stakes and payouts go through mobile money, so every transaction has to be safe to retry and fully auditable.
• Two gatekeepers. Before going live, both the bank side and the mobile network operator review how the platform connects, authenticates and handles money.

The MVP

Four engineers took the platform from nothing to live with real money in about a year. The first version had only what's needed to take a bet safely and pay it out:

• The USSD product. Menus players navigate through, plus menu generators so the offer could be rebuilt without code changes.
• Network integration with the mobile operator's USSD gateway.
• One payment provider for deposits, stakes and payouts.
• Automatic settlement of tickets from sports results.
• A back office with reports for the operator's team.
• Security sign-off from both the bank side and the network operator.

How it's built

The platform is a set of small, independent services that talk through a central message broker, rather than one big application:

• Player sessions are kept apart from everything else. The menu engine can run as several instances side by side, so traffic peaks around big matches are absorbed by adding capacity, not by slowing down.
• Settlement runs on its own. Results come in from the sports feed and tickets are settled in the background, without touching live player sessions.
• Each payment provider is isolated. Adding a new mobile-money provider or market doesn't put the existing ones at risk.
• Reporting reads from a replica, so heavy back-office reports never slow down betting.

Seven years later

The MVP turned out to be the smaller part of the story. Since launch the platform has been in continuous development and grew well beyond its first version:

• From one market to several across Africa.
• From one payment provider to many mobile-money providers and operators.
• Bonus bets, jackpots and a referral system for retention.
• Risk alerts, SMS notifications and more capacity for peak traffic.

Each of these was added on top of the original architecture, without a rewrite.