With Infobip, UIPlay is bringing policy information, documents, and guided conversations to WhatsApp, helping South African funeral policyholders handle routine needs in one familiar channel.
Marthinus Jansen Van Vuuren Content Marketing Expert
South Africa’s funeral industry runs on trust, paperwork, and proximity. Policies are sold through brokers, claims are settled at parlors, and for decades the administration behind all of it assumed a customer who could show up in person.
UIPlay has spent 27 years building the software underneath that industry, developing policy and insurance management systems for the brokers, parlors, and insurers who keep it running.
Emmanuel Raphiri is the Product Development Manager leading innovation at UIPlay. His main role is to lead innovation and adapt new AI technologies into the company’s existing systems , includingautomations, AI integrations, WhatsApp, all the third-party platforms that integrate with their systems. Under his direction, UIPlay’s customers have seen a decisive shift in how UIPlay’s customers experience its products: engagement that once fanned out across SMS, email, web, and apps now converges on a single channel. The reasoning behind this decision, and the infrastructure required to act on it, is a useful example for any company building locally with ambitions beyond its home market.
For years, reaching customers meant covering every channel at once. Raphiri argues that assumption has quietly expired, overtaken by smart devices and by WhatsApp’s steady accumulation of features.
“A few years ago, SMS, MMS and email were the dominant channels,” he says. “Now, with WhatsApp introducing so many features, we’ve noticed that from CEO level all the way down to the everyday customer, people prefer to communicate on one messaging platform.”
UIPlay acted on this trend. They decided to streamline everything, including email, website traffic, apps, and channel it directly into WhatsApp.
“Instead of juggling multiple platforms, people just want to engage on one chosen instant-messaging platform, and WhatsApp has been our go-to,” says Raphiri.
This isn’t just a customer-experience decision. Fewer channels mean fewer integrations to maintain, fewer places for a policy query to go missing, and a single thread where a customer’s history is already visible.
Committing to WhatsApp at scale is easy. Doing it well is hard. Enterprise-grade messaging demands accreditation, carrier-grade infrastructure, and the working capital to front volume before customers pay for it. For a software company of UIPlay’s size, each of those is a barrier rather than a line item.
That calculation shaped how UIPlay chose its platform partner.
“What motivated us to partner with Infobip was the market reach, as well as the access to its capital infrastructure,” Raphiri says.
The second half of that sentence matters more than it appears. “If you have a large consumer base, you normally have to fund it yourself,” he explains. “But companies like Infobip allow 60- to 90-day payment plans, or a credit line that lets us, as a smaller software development company, provide world-class solutions to our clients.”
It is an honest description of what partnership actually does for a company operating in a competitive space: it removes the cash-flow ceiling that would otherwise cap how many customers UIPlay can serve at once.
Beyond capital, the practical unlock was accreditation. Offering WhatsApp Business solutions requires a formal approval process that’s slower and more involved for a company going it alone.
“The partnership helped with getting the Meta business verification, as well as the credit lines,” Raphiri says.
With that in place, UIPlay could build richer communication journeys into its SaaS platforms rather than assemble the underlying plumbing first. The effect is visible in what customers can now do without picking up a phone: access policy information, retrieve documents, and complete routine transactions in the same conversation thread they already use for everything else. For policyholders outside major centres, self-service through WhatsApp replaces travel and call-centre queues for tasks that never needed either.
Raphiri frames the standard he is aiming for plainly: “providing world-class service using world-class platforms.”
UIPlay’s systems have always been built around outbound messaging. “All of our systems are built on notification pulses,” Raphiri says. “From SMS to email to WhatsApp now, which we’ve expanded a lot these past few years as WhatsApp has grown into a preferred channel.”
The more significant change was moving from notification to dialogue. Asked for the work he is proudest of, Raphiri points to a first for his sector: “We introduced guided conversations to the funeral industry, using Infobip’s Moments and Answers. That was a brand-new feature that we were among the first to bring into the funeral industry, and it changed the dynamic and direction of all our solutions and packages.”
Those customer engagement and chatbot-building capabilities now sit within AgentOS, Infobip’s unified platform. The category shift they enabled is the part Raphiri emphasises: a customer who receives a message can now be walked through a claim, a renewal, or a document request inside the conversation, instead of being pushed back out to a form or a call center.
Raphiri’s view of what comes next is less about adding channels than about connecting systems. “For us, the path of least resistance is to build an entire ecosystem, like with the launch of AgentOS, where we can communicate and collaborate across multiple systems, and then choose the cheapest method of communication rather than the best method of communication,” he says.
He expects the same logic to decide who leads the market regionally, and he is explicit that the winning product will be designed for African conditions rather than adapted to them after the fact.
“I think the next dominant force will be a company that builds a unique, Africa-centric application. One that allows integration and API integration across all platforms into that one chosen communication platform,” Raphiri says. “Open it up to APIs, bring a whole industry onto it, and it will just take a ripple effect from there.”
On timing, he is unambiguous. With large language models now widely available, he sees the window for building that platform as open rather than approaching.
“We don’t know what’s next, but I can tell you: the next person to launch it at the right time will dominate the industry.”
