22 Dec 2013

TransferBee and the Cellulant cashout

I had to cash some dough from a friend in the UK and gave Transferbee a spin.

Simply works. And fast too. I got the notification just hours after the transfer was made. While it could have been a very smooth ride, I experienced some friction with Cellulant wallet the mobile money provider powering the service. I must not fail to mention Cellulant wallet has awesome customer support though. In the last week, their agents have called me around 5 times following up on my every issue.

  1. Wrong SSL domain name
    The first issue I ran into was with their SSL certificate. The URL in the sms I got read cellulantwallet.com. The cert on the domain was however for paymee.com.ng. I had to do a quick search to confirm they are mirror sites before bypassing my browser's warning. They should fix this. I believe it already affects their bounce rate.

  2. Poor UI
    Quick question, is there a CBN law saying mobile money sites must not be beautiful? Maybe it's that part of me that loves beautiful things talking, but Cellulant wallet really needs a facelift.

  3. Transaction limit
    So the first thing on my mind after getting in was getting out my money. I quickly followed the "transfer to bank" navigation option only to notice transactions are limited to N3,000 per instance and N10,000 daily. In other words, cashing out N90,000 will mean 30 transactions spread over 10 days. I sent them a mail about this and they mentioned it was because my account was on bronze. (Nowhere on the site mentioned this). They later upgraded me to gold, allowing me N10,000 per transaction and up to N100,000 daily. Again, nowhere on the site has information or how-to on upgrading accounts. They should put this somewhere in the site. In fact, the perfect scenerio will be once the system detects you are on bronze, the notification and upgrade details come up on the transfer page.

  4. Transaction failures

    Out of 20 transfer attempts, only 4 was successful. That's 80% fail rate. I think the issue was from their gateway (Interswitch) though. Or so I was made to believe. The customer care agent that called explained it is the normal switch issues; that the failures are similar to the "network ones" at the ATM. Like I said, the customer care was awesome. They cushioned the pain.

Transferbee is a nice service. If the credit and cashout friction can be reduced, they are on to a great thing. Overall, I didn't regret using them.

 

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My name is Opeyemi Obembe. I build things for web and mobile and write about my experiments. Follow me on Twitter–@kehers.

 

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