Kokomlemle, Accra — One of Africa’s leading mobile and internet value-added service (VAS) providers, Ghana’s SMSGH is preparing to outdoor even more applications as it moves into its newly-built US$1.25 million state-of-the-art offices by the end of October 2014.

This fast-growing indigenous start-up has for nine years run on the back of its three major platforms; MYtxtBOX, Jumpfon, and MPower Payments which have grown its customers to over 25 million across four African countries – Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Kenya – with millions of mobile VAS transaction volumes on a daily basis.

The ever-growing company achieved all this by working from a relatively small space at Kokomlemle, where its offices sit about 40 employees comprising engineers/developers, platform managers, business solution experts, call center executives, and country operation directors among other staff categories.

General Manager of the company, Alex Adjei Bram reveals: “We will move into our new offices by the end of October. It’s an exciting time for the company, and even more, having this coincide with the launch of our Unity Aggregation Platform. This will mark the beginning of something entirely different in our space as it is a global first. This platform will host a plethora of innovative mobile and online-based applications to serve our teaming clients across Africa and elsewhere.”

The new SMSGH three-story building is nicely segmented into various areas, and a tour of the interior showed a bigger sales area, platform monitoring center, app development area, call center, an administrative area, a boardroom, and an anti-boardroom (a more relaxed and casual area for meetings and discussions).

Alex Adjei Bram said when the company moves into its new state-of-the-art offices, located on the same premises as the old one, “there is going to be a flood of applications and services that we will release into the market to further deepen Ghana’s position as a leading VAS community in Africa.”

SMSGH is close to finishing about 10 new tailor-made applications for specific corporate clients for promotions and other services those organizations are about to run in the country soon.

Alex Adjei Bram said “The team here at SMSGH is a very entrepreneurial one, so we measure our success by the result we give our customers. I would not say business has not been good but the financial reward is not our yardstick at SMSGH – to the extent that our customers are getting results or value, and our products are helping businesses to grow we can say we are successful.”

Regulator

He believes the regulatory environment in Ghana has been pretty responsive to the industry but things could be better if the regulations properly encompass every aspect of the VAS space with an orientation towards helping the main players, who are mainly young but skillful Ghanaian entrepreneurs, to grow.

Particularly in the area of stemming abuse of VAS services, Bram said the regulator has been largely responsive and some industry players now need to sanitize their operations to meet regulatory standards.

But he still believes “the regulator has some catching up to do with the VAS industry – we need a regulator that is not too speculative or restrictive because that could also stifle innovation,” he said.

He said “at SMSGH we have effective systems of preventing and checking abuse on our applications and have also signed on to the Code of Ethics of WASPAG (Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Ghana) for the purposes of ensuring sanity in our industry,” he said.

The government has announced that soon it would issue a license for a one-stop-shop clearinghouse for the telecom and VAS industry, and Bram thinks the clearing house is a great idea because “it will bring organization, sanity, and a fair playing field into the entire telecom industry and potentially help the local VAS space to grow.”

Source: myjoyonline.com/