This is where modern border tech comes in. Today’s modern digital platforms bring together travel authorisations, biometrics and real-time risk checks to keep things secure and moving fast.

It is not just about speed.  Governments need the tools to act quickly, confidently, and smartly.

These are the “Big Five” challenges border agencies face – and how digital tools are helping them stay ahead.

1. Doing more with less

Budgets are tight. Staff are stretched thin. And the tech is often outdated. Meanwhile, traveller numbers keep climbing while various threats are increasing and evolving.

Digital tools help address these problems.  For instance, online electronic travel authorisations and e-Visas let travellers apply online from anywhere with no need for in-person consular visits.

Real-time updates to entry rules become easy to do with Advance Passenger Processing (APP) and it does not require systems overhauls.

And biometric automated border control gates (a.k.a. eGates or ABC gates) and kiosks speed up ID checks, so border agency officers can focus their attention on the high-risk travellers.

The results are lower costs, faster passenger processing, stronger security and smoother traveller journeys through airport and cruise terminal passport checkpoints. 

2. Keeping up with changing rules

Border policies can shift fast, thanks to politics, global events, and new rules. Agencies must stay in step with international standards, industry frameworks and regulations from the likes of the UN International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) One ID, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its Entry/Exit System.

Rigid systems cannot keep pace. But more flexible digital ones can. Dynamic Advance Passenger Processing lets governments change entry criteria easily and share information with airlines to approve or deny boarding based on identity, documentation and risk profiles.

This allows government agencies to be flexible, compliant and ready for whatever comes next.

3. Staying ahead of health risks

COVID-19 showed just how vulnerable manual border checks can be.  The health threats created long lines, lots of contact between border agents and passengers along with slow health screenings.

Now, digital systems are built with health in mind. Travellers can upload test results or vaccine records before they fly for verification.

Self-service eGates and kiosks with facial recognition make for fast, contactless entry or exit processing. And everything updates in real time.

It’s safer, faster, more accurate and gives travellers peace of mind. 

4. Responding to mass migration / displacement

Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are forcing millions to move. Borders need to handle sudden surges while treating these people with care and dignity.

Digital tools help make that possible. In a digital clearance process, Electronic Travel Authorisations (ETAs) serve as the first layer, pre-screening travellers before they begin their journey.

At departure, APP links to this data, allowing airlines to verify authorisation and to approve or deny boarding in real-time.

Upon arrival, eGates use biometric checks to match travellers with their cleared records by automating and efficiently finalising the clearance process.  Together, these systems create a continuous, risk-based control flow from pre-travel to arrival.

For border agencies, it’s about staying in control, knowing who’s coming and going while being compassionate even while under time pressure.

5. Stopping organised crime

Transnational Criminal Organisations exploit border weaknesses to illicitly move drugs, weapons, counterfeit goods and to traffic people. Manual checks alone can’t stop them.

Digital platforms offer a smarter defence. Governments can conduct real-time risk profiling using Passenger Name Record (PNR) data, APP integration with watchlists, biometric collection with ETAs, and travel histories to flag suspicious travellers.

Integrated biometric clearance links eGates and kiosks with digital travel applications, so only verified travellers can use automated lanes.  This enables instant watchlist checks.

This strategic transformation empowers governments to intercept threats before they arrive.

The future of Borders is smart, safe, and seamless

The right tech will provide enhanced security together with smooth and fast travel. Modern border solutions help governments protect people, stay compliant, respond to health and humanitarian needs, and help economies to be competitive, attracting investments, trade, travel and tourism, while enhancing the traveller experience.

This isn’t just an upgrade. It’s a whole new strategic way of thinking about modern borders – built for today but ready for tomorrow.

In an era where the world continues to embrace all things digital, Africa has the potential to stand at the forefront of mobile app adoption, presenting app marketers with a unique set of opportunities and challenges.

As the continent continues to witness a rapid surge in smartphone usage, mastering mobile app marketing in Africa has become more crucial than ever.

With over 1.3 billion people, Africa is a dynamic and diverse market for mobile apps. According to recent statistics, Africa boasts the fastest-growing mobile market globally, making it a hotspot for mobile app marketers.

As the number of smartphone users continues to rise, so does the potential for app downloads and engagement.

As the mobile application market burgeons with over 5.6 million apps available across major app stores, merely creating an outstanding app is not the end of the story.

To embark on this journey with a winning strategy, you must focus on four pivotal steps that maximise your odds of success.

To successfully launch and promote your app, start by identifying a real problem through extensive market research.

Understand your target audience’s concerns, interests, and behaviours, and determine how your app addresses their challenges.

Next, focus on building a strong foundation through App Store Optimization (ASO), including keyword research and visually appealing app store creatives.

In the app promotion phase, prioritise organic growth through genuine community building, owned media channels, influencer collaborations, and targeted user acquisition campaigns.

Finally, equip yourself with the right tools, using Mobile Measurement Partners (MMP) for campaign evaluation and app analytics to make data-driven improvements.

Challenges in the African App Landscape

Navigating the African app landscape is not without its challenges. From linguistic and cultural diversity, to varying network infrastructures and limited access to payment options, there are hurdles that app marketers need to address to succeed in this promising market.

Moreover, competition in the space is fierce, making it essential for marketers to have a clear, data-driven strategy.

Unlocking Success with Data-Driven Insights

To master mobile app marketing on the continent, data-driven insights are key. AppsFlyer has recognized the need for a comprehensive strategy to tackle the African market successfully.

Here are some insights and strategies to help app marketers thrive:

1. Localised Content is Key: Africa is incredibly diverse with various languages, cultures, and traditions. Tailoring your app and marketing content to local preferences can significantly boost user engagement.

AppsFlyer’s data analysis can help you understand your audience better, allowing you to create content that resonates.

2. Optimise for Low Connectivity: In many parts of Africa, network connectivity can be unreliable. Africa is the continent with the lowest internet penetration rate at 39% of the population, compared to a global average of nearly 60%.

To ensure that your app remains accessible, consider creating a lighter version that consumes less data, and functions smoothly across slow networks.

3. Flexible Payment Options: The continent faces unique challenges when it comes to payment methods.

Offering a variety of payment options, such as mobile money and local payment gateways, can significantly increase your app’s accessibility and conversion rates.

4. Leveraging Influencer Marketing: African audiences often trust recommendations from local influencers. Collaborating with influencers can be an effective way to reach your target audience.

5. Continuous Data Analysis: The mobile app landscape evolves rapidly. Regularly analysing user data through platforms like AppsFlyer is essential for adjusting your strategies to stay competitive and relevant.

6. User Retention is Vital: User acquisition is just the beginning. Focusing on user retention strategies can maximise the lifetime value of your users, ensuring long-term success in the market.

According to a report by Statista, 57% of mobile app users will delete an app after the first month of use, therefore it is imperative for app marketers to engage in user retention strategies in order to enhance user experience, ultimately encouraging users to stay.

Africa’s mobile app market is brimming with promise, but realising that potential requires a strategic and data-driven approach.

With AppsFlyer as an ally, mobile app marketers can harness the power of data insights to overcome challenges, unlock opportunities, and master mobile app marketing in Africa.

By localising content, optimising for connectivity issues, and staying on top of user preferences through data analysis, app marketers can position their apps for success in this rapidly growing and dynamic market.

As the continent continues to emerge as a mobile app powerhouse, the key to success lies in understanding the unique landscape and adapting your approach to the local context.

The future of mobile app marketing in Africa is bright, and those who embrace it with data-driven insights will undoubtedly be the ones to shine the brightest.

Can you tell me about the main features of the Keet app?

Keet is a free, fully-encrypted chat application that utilises peer-to-peer connections to facilitate real-time audio/video calls, text chat and file sharing. It is powered by an innovative stack of distributed technology, including DHT distributed databases, that allows users to find and connect to each other to form a swarm, on real-world home and office networks.

This technique is called Distributed Holepunching and allows users to locate and connect to each other using only cryptographic key pairs upon authorization. 

Keet accomplishes all of this while eliminating the risks of a central point of failure and over reliance on third-party platforms.

Unlike traditional video chat apps, which use cloud-based software or outside servers as intermediaries to connect two or more people, Keet users can initiate a high-quality call directly to another individual’s device. This allows for video chatting to take place without a central server or company operating the network.

Additionally, Keet has a peer-to-peer payment built-in feature that allows for Bitcoin and USDt micropayments . By integrating payments through the Lightning network, our goal is for content creators to be able to monetize the amazing content they create without being dependent on third parties, from the people who consume the content directly to the creators. Keet ALPHA for Windows and Keet Mobile IOS & Android are now officially available.

What was the biggest technical challenge you faced during the development process?

We are a fully peer-to-peer company. We never compromise that idea. We do that because we believe privacy is one of the most important things in this day and age.

This also means we have no shortage of technical challenges, as basically every other communication app out there uses centralised servers. Making devices connect directly with each other, even on home networks, has been something we’ve been working on perfecting for multiple years before launching Keet and was definitely not an easy task.

The same goes for making scalable peer-to-peer data structures that allows the app to query just a subset of the data it needs to display chats, or stream terabytes of file data between users – all encrypted.

One thing we love about solving these problems though, is that once we solved them for Keet, we solved them for any other app out there that wants to build a scalable peer-to-peer app. That’s one of the really exciting things about working at Holepunch – once we solve for one we solve for all.

How did you ensure the security and privacy of users’ messages and data

What sets Keet apart from other chat apps, particularly other video chat apps, is the fact it is purely peer-to-peer. There has, rightfully, been growing concern over user privacy and users giving up control of their data.

That’s why we at Tether and Bitfinex chose to participate in the development of Holepunch together with the Hypercore team, the framework that Keet itself was built on..  Through Holepunch, Keet can establish a more efficient and decentralised connection between peers, while maintaining a high level of security and privacy through encryption.

Both Holepunch and Keet were founded to unlock global communications and empower freedom of speech, access to information and combat censorship around the world. Allowing users to be in control of their own data and communication channels are fundamental to breaking free from technology monopolies.

What are the unique selling points of Keet? 

Keet is a free, first-of-its-kind peer-to-peer chat app built on the Holepunch framework and uniquely integrated with Bitcoin payment features.

Unlike other chat apps on the market, Keet is a private and secured peer-to-peer chat app that allows high-quality and real-time audio-video calls and streams as well as the exchange of heavy chunks of files without the norm of a centralised server or any third party.

With Keet, millions of people will be empowered with the freedom of speech, easier access to information as well as having full control of their data and communication channel without worrying about the risk of leakages, hacking, or censorship, because Keet will never ask for users’ data. Keet believes that freedom of choice, communication and finances are the lifeblood of the future, and anything that will enhance those freedoms is worth amplifying. 

How did you approach user experience and user interface design?

We are a communications app. That means that there is a certain UX that users expect from similar apps. However, being a peer-to-peer app there have been so many things in UI we have had to rethink which has been a fun challenge. Since there are no servers, the app is never actually unavailable. Messages are stored locally and replicated with peers in your chat as they appear.

This means that when you enter a chat, it’s instant and just shows your latest replicated messages, unlike other centralised apps. As an example, in our recent versions, we worked on the UX around these kinds of things. The app now shows a small indicator when it is looking for new data, which helps users get a sense of what’s happening.

In fact, great UX is one of our biggest priorities in the company. We never want Keet to just be “a peer-to-peer chat app” – we want it to be “the best chat app”. That means having UX that takes advantage of all the power peer-to-peer offers, but by giving it to users in ways where it’s all about the features it provides. Right now I think file sharing in Keet especially reflects this. You can drop any file and it’s instantly shared. Other peers can see the files immediately, and start streaming them immediately. No technobabble needed.

One of the things we love about building Keet, is that it’s an app we use extensively everyday to communicate with the team and friends. That means we are heavy users and get to provide our own feedback both to the internal roadmap but also in terms of what needs improvement or fixing.

As most other companies, we also have a dedicated Q/A team that helps make sure the app has no regressions and tracks whatever bugs appear. Testing peer-to-peer apps is a bit different than testing centralised apps. Since the app is all you need, testing fully end-to-end is a lot easier than normal deployments. We just swarm a prerelease app to our network and have our team test that. Once the testing period is over, we simply update the release app – all over the peer-to-peer network obviously!

Can you tell me about any unique or innovative solutions you implemented in your app

This is a hard question as the entire app is unique and innovative behind the scenes. Similar to how we describe the UX, one of the things we keep loving about Keet is how it presents a really simple interface on top of an extremely novel and innovative engine. Some things that always stand out to us as technical people, is how the entire app itself is distributed peer-to-peer as well.

Once you get the initial installer from the web site, it’s all data swarming between you and the peers. This is truly powerful, as updates are just signed by us, but run directly between users, giving them even more privacy and resilience. This is the same internal engine, Hypercore, that runs chat replication, file replication and more, and this just shows the power of peer-to-peer. We solved general data replication once, and now every aspect of our app is using it.

Bringing the entire peer-to-peer stack to mobile, also required a lot of innovation. In the end we have to develop a completely new runtime for running Javascript based apps on mobile with the capabilities we needed for peer-to-peer, such as networking, file system apis, even timers.

We actually JUST released the latest version of this engine to our mobile app, and it is super exciting to watch that develop and mature.

What are your future plans for the development and improvement of your Keet instant messenger app

Keet is currently in ALPHA, but since the release of Keet mobile we’ve been heavily iterating it and we are getting ready to release the BETA version that incorporates a lot of feedback we’ve been getting from users. BETA runs on a fully new chat engine that we are calling Big Rooms. It allows for chat rooms with hundreds of thousands of users inside, still all fully peer-to-peer. This also includes features like emoji reactions, moderator roles and more. We are super excited to start rolling this out to users soon.

Additionally, we are implementing blind mirroring on top of the Big Rooms engine. Blind mirroring allows any peer to host a fully encrypted live copy of a chat room. With blind mirroring you can have fully private rooms, but you can offline the uptime of the rooms to peers in the network – with no loss of privacy. This is especially exciting for Keet mobile, as it allows you to offload your mobile rooms to other Keet peers, making it really easy to host mobile-only rooms.

We are also expanding our payments options in the app, integrating USDt payments and more. 2023 will definitely be a great year for Keet.

BLord took to his Facebook account to share a message and screenshot of his email exchange with Davido’s management. In his initial email, BLord approached Davido with a proposal for a one-year endorsement agreement for his airtime app.

However, Davido’s management responded with a shocking revelation – the artist’s demand was a whopping $5 million (equivalent to approximately N3.7 billion). This amount took BLord and his team by surprise, as their budget for the endorsement was $250,000 (equivalent to N150 million).

BLord, known for his entrepreneurial spirit, had recently made headlines when he turned down a $10 million funding offer from overseas investors for his latest invention, the BillPoint app.

According to him, his company firmly believed that the app had the potential to generate far more revenue than the offered sum in just a few years.

The BLord Group, a fintech firm that has diversified into real estate and other industries, developed the BillPoint app as a response to the challenges faced by traditional banks in handling small transactions like subscription payments, power bills, and recurring utility payments.

With an extensive network of over 30 service providers, BillPoint offers a secure, user-friendly platform for online bill payments, revolutionizing the way people manage their financial obligations.

BLord’s encounter with Davido’s endorsement fee serves as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of the business world, where negotiations and financial expectations can vary significantly.

Nonetheless, BLord remains steadfast in his pursuit of innovative solutions and is determined to make a lasting impact in the tech and fintech sectors

The founder of the B-Lord Group claimed that he declined the offer since his company anticipated that the app will make far more money than the sum in a few years.

This information was provided in a statement released by his media office as he outlined how the BillPoint mobile app is reviving modernity.

To make it simple for people to pay their electricity and cable TV bills, Linus launched the app in April 2023.

According to him, “The BillPoint app is here to make transactions easy for Nigerians. It is an unarguable fact that no one walks down to vendors to sort their bills any longer when they can do so online that is one of the more reasons this App will succeed and I am optimistic about the future of the app and its acceptability.”

BLord also said it has generated a lot just within days of its launch and it is proof of how valuable the product is, adding that it’s going to solve problems for many users in the coming.

The BLord Group is a fintech firm that has diversified into real estate and other industries over time. Their bill payment service, Billpoint, was developed as a reaction to some of the significant problems traditional banks were having with small transactions like subscription payments, power bills, and other recurring utility payments.

With more than 30 service providers linked to the network, Billpoint offers a secure, simple, and useful way to pay bills online.

In the year since the eNaira’s introduction, over 700,000 transactions totaling N8 billion have been logged, according to CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele.

“Since its launch, the eNaira has offered Nigerians endless possibilities in using financial services, thus living up to the chosen slogan, “Same Naira, More Possibilities,” as well as accomplishing some set objectives,” Emefiele said in his keynote address at the “eNaira 1 year Anniversary” held at the CBN Main Auditorium today.

“Specifically, there has been overwhelming interest and encouraging response from Nigerians and other parties across the world as indicated by the following milestones:

“33 banks are fully integrated and live on the platform. N3.00 billion has been successfully minted by the bank. N2.10 billion has been issued to financial institutions. About 1.0 million (919,000) customers have been onboarded.

“Over 3,305 merchants have successfully registered on the eNaira platform across the country including Shoprite, Sahad Stores, A.A. Rano fuelling stations, Fraser Suites, and November Cubes, among others.

“Over 700,000 transactions amounting to about N8.00 billion have been recorded on the platform. Over 2.5 million daily visits to the eNaira website. “

Emefiele said the eNaira sought to leverage the huge opportunity of mobile telecommunications as a distribution channel for offering digital financial services to the underserved and unbanked population.

“It is the bank’s hope that the eNaira will drive the digital economy agenda and foster a more prosperous Nigeria,” he said.

Built directly into Paway’s platform and mobile app, Ivy’s cash advances allow workers to easily get an infusion of cash ahead of their wages, helping them better manage their liquidity and achieve financial stability.

This new feature puts the needs of dog walkers first, ensuring that they are able to stay on the job, regardless of when and how they are paid.

This will entice more potential dog walkers and pet care professionals to join the Paway platform. 

“Partnering with Ivy has created room for trust between dog walker and company, something no other dog walking app is able to offer”, says Jason Meltzer, CEO, and founder of Paway.

“With the gig economy booming and so many new opportunities for a side hustle separate from your day job, the lines can get blurry especially when it comes to receiving a paycheck. We couldn’t be more excited to join forces with Ivy to offer a solution in the dog walking space.”

Paway and Ivy share a vision of the future where workers do not have to compromise between flexibility and financial security. “The economy is transforming, and new patterns of work are becoming commonplace”, says Arseniy Banayev, CEO and co-founder of Ivy.

“Unfortunately, this leaves millions of hardworking Americans overlooked by traditional financial institutions. Today, we’re incredibly excited to work with Paway and other gig marketplaces to fill that gap with innovative financial products that provide more sustainable cash flow for gig workers.”

Ivy is the fintech platform for the gig economy. Founded by immigrants with deep roots in their communities and in the tech industry, Ivy enables gig marketplaces to offer liquidity solutions that make sense for their workers.

Using the Ivy platform and API, companies can easily embed innovative financial products into their own mobile and web apps, ultimately expanding financial access to an otherwise overlooked segment of the population