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By Oluwatobi Opusunju
Truecaller has announced it now has over 100 million daily active users. It’s a significant jump for one of the world’s popular mobile caller identification platforms from 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) to 100 million daily active users (DAUs) globally in less than a year. In Africa, the company has recorded an exponential uptake of its app with over 50 million users across the continent.
Truecaller is one of the fastest growing consumer apps in Africa drawing huge users from Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya and South Africa. In Nigeria, as at November last year, the app had about 6.2 million users; a figure that has grown rapidly since then and will reflect well in its latest growth figure.
“Truecaller is pleased and excited to announce that we now have more than 100 million daily active users using our app for their daily communication.
“There are only a handful of mobile-only services that impact as many users each and every day and we are humbled to be able to join this exclusive group,” said CEO of Truecaller, Alan Mamedi in his recent blog post.
Truecaller’s popularity has hinged on its ability to help mobile phone users identify SPAM and also recognise callers to determine whether to pick a call or not.
In a recent study conducted by Truecaller, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Egypt rank among the top 20 countries in the world being plagued by unwanted spam calls. According to reports, the app has identified and blocked more than half a billion spam calls in Africa on a monthly basis and over 50% of all messages received by users in the region are considered as spam.
However, the platform over the years has evolved from just being a Caller ID and spam blocking app, to a full-fledged communications platform with calling, SMS, Flash Messages and payment services.
Recently, Truecaller partnered with Paystack to allow more merchants across the continent accept payments online in a frictionless and secure manner by leveraging its mobile identity product, Truecaller SDK. Paystack is one of Nigeria’s largest payments startups, processing nearly 20% of all online transactions in Africa’s largest economy.
Paystack already makes three verification options available to developers – the ability to verify the Bank Verification Number (BVN) of customers (BVN is an identifying number introduced by the Nigerian financial regulator, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in 2014), the ability to verify bank account details, and the ability to verify card details. Truecaller is now the fourth new verification option, and the impact of this will be to create more trust in the payments flow for African businesses.
Truecaller’s portfolio of operations in Nigeria also includes a recent deal with VConnect allowing Truecaller to integrate VConnect’s Business directory to its app. The integration allows Truecaller’s users to efficiently identify service providers and others on Nigeria’s top digital business directory.
