News

M-Pesa hits 50m active users in Africa

September 9, 2021
Safaricom’s flagship mobile money platform M-Pesa has hit 50 million active customers in Africa, boosting its position as the continent’s largest fintech company.  M-Pesa is run by Safaricom and Vodacom and is now available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt. It provides customers with access to the widest agent network across the continent with more than 430,000 agent outlets and cashless payments in more than 400,000 businesses.
CDPI Emerging Markets

One-Fifth of Companies Use Marketing Automation to Its Full Potential: Ascend2 Survey

September 8, 2021
Ascend2 took a look at the state of marketing automation and found that just 20% of respondents feel they are using their system to its full potential.  Lack of training (39%), resources (32%) and budget (31%) were the most cited obstacles, ranking well ahead of poor integration (16%), missing features (14%) and decentralized data (14%).  This doesn’t mean integration is a solved problem: just 7% of respondents said their marketing automation is fully integrated with other systems and 29% said it’s mostly integrated.
CDPI Newsletter

One-Third of Martech Replacement Systems are Built, Not Bought: Third Door Media Study

September 8, 2021
This Third Door Media / MarTech survey found 67% of organizations replaced at least one marketing tool in the past year, with marketing automation (24%), email distribution (23%) and CRM (23%) at the top of the list.  Interesting, but there’s no baseline of how many had each type of system in the first place.  Just over half said getting better features was the main reason for replacement – far outpacing cost.  About 30% of the replacement systems were home grown.  Download for more on decision time, upgrade champions, Covid impact,... Read More >
CDPI Newsletter

Two-Thirds of Marketers Say Other Companies’ Content is Mostly Irrelevant: Lucidpress Research

September 8, 2021
This just in from Lake Wobegon: two-thirds (68%) of respondents to this Lucidpress survey said they’re confident that most of their company’s content is relevant, even though only 32% find other companies are sending relevant content to them. Possibly related: 27% consistently measure the ROI of the content they create. Just 32% say more than half their content is personalized.
CDPI Newsletter

Headless Commerce Just Keeps Growing

September 7, 2021
Headless commerce makes it easier to deploy custom ecommerce front-ends by providing the underlying processing technology. It’s an important trend but there’s too much happening to cover in depth.  So here are some headlines to give you a flavor: Shopistry has integrated with the Square payments platform and joined its App Marketplace.  Fast Simon has expanded its Shopify integration with  a new shopping optimization tools.  OneView Commerce has made its transaction engine available on Microsoft Azure.   You get the idea.
CDPI Newsletter

Observe.AI Buys ScopeAI to Analyze Conversations

September 7, 2021
Conversational analytics is another growing space. The latest news there is that contact center AI vendor Observe.AI bought ScopeAI, which automatically extracts insights from chat, email, and social conversations.  Related items we’ve already reported include: ZenDesk’s purchase of Cleverly, Level AI’s launch with $15 million funding, Involve.AI’s $16 million Series A, and Verint’s purchase of Conversocial.
CDPI Newsletter