MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/"Internet of Things" connectivity protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium. Africa still faces internet connectivity problems. 2G is not going anywhere any time soon. A shocking 60% of sub-saharan people don't have bank accounts. How do we apply this technology in remote areas, tie it with Apache Kafka for financial inclusion?

In Tanzania and Africa by extension, the Agency Banking Model is the best innovation that ever happened to address financial inclusion. In this model, commercial banks contract third party retail networks as bank agents. Upon successful application, vetting and approval, these agents are authorized to offer select banking services on behalf of the banks. This relationship creates an Agency Banking business model.

Bank agents are issued with POS Terminals which have the agency banking application installed. Uchumi Commercial Bank has over 350+ agents all over Tanzania. The majority come from remote villages where 2G is the king. We faced one major problem after GO-LIVE. Agents were calling every time. The POS Terminals just couldn't connect or reach the bank servers. You can imagine the pressure the bank put us through. Transactions were not going through. We realized this was going to cost us business. We had to think and innovate or we are kicked out.

After a lot of research, we deployed MQTT Server and tied it with Apache Kafka. All transactions from the POS were now going through MQTT and then from MQTT to Apache Kafka, from where message consumers could execute the transactions. 1 year since we went LIVE on MQTT and Apache Kafka, NO agent has called to complain of a connectivity problem. We were able to fix this issue permanently.