With a total market value of R497.68 billion, value-added services (VAS) continue to be a strategic business driver for market-leading banks and retailers in South Africa. With the right technology partner who understands the market and importance of digital offerings, expansion can be rapid and straightforward.
Our latest research found that bank apps dominate as the preferred channel for almost all VAS purchases. This highlights the need for businesses to expand their VAS offerings further than traditional channels to optimise the convenience and accessibility brought by digital channels. Capitec’s latest financial results prove just that, with reports that their VAS net income grew by 56% due to an increase in VAS adoption, pushing their banking app transaction volumes to 1.5 billion.
A technology partner who understands how to achieve speed to market to support your expansion objectives is undoubtedly a factor in the success achieved by banks and retail enterprises. The primary result is a thriving digital VAS business that’s always on, always available, and always ‘stocked’ with a full suite of VAS products.
Create a digital one-stop shop by expanding services
With the most popular VAS products ranging from prepaid airtime and data to bill payments, the question is which services should you have? All of them: All VAS services have shown growth between 2022 and 2024.
VAS Uptake in South Africa
The reality is, when a customer needs to make one VAS purchase on your channel, why not enable them to buy other services during this time as well? Not having an extensive VAS suite readily available limits your reach and risks customer loyalty. Availability and convenience could have them turning to a competitor that is better equipped to give them everything they want, within one purchasing experience.
New services can be added faster if you are integrated into a solution that has prebuilt, multi-channel APIs. This means that your business only needs to maintain a single integration to access many service types, reducing complex and expensive development.
Always available with a wide and diverse network of service providers
What’s the point of offering all the services if they aren’t reliably available? A multi-provider model ensures that VAS sales are always completed, even if one provider is down. Preferential routing directs traffic to the most competitive and available provider, ensuring you don’t lose sales or margins unnecessarily.
A competitive solution includes a large service provider network that simply needs you to plug in. Just as with services, adding a new service provider should be easy once you’re integrated and live with your first.
It's also essential that back-office teams have access to smart, automated failover processes - such as load-balancing - that deliver a resilient solution and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Scale confidently and quickly for high transaction volumes
Expanding into a high-growth, high-volume market means preparing for a surge in volumes. A cloud-native technology solution helps you build trust and speed by ensuring rapid, high-volume processing from day one. To ensure back-office teams are not going in blind, real-time monitoring and reporting gives the team high-resolution visibility, allowing you to maintain control as you scale.
Electrum is the trusted technology partner for rapid and secure expansion
Electrum processes over 200 million transactions per month for South Africa’s leading banks, retailers and MNOs. Our trusted cloud-native solution leverages deep expertise, provides access to an extensive service provider network, and reduces complexities to get you to market fast.
Learn how you can expand your VAS business for high-growth digital channels or get in touch to discuss how we can help you to optimise your VAS business.
