The New Yukuwallet (Release note: 05.01.0020)

Third, on our values at Yukudemy is innovation. We believe that for us to be useful to the eking Yukudemy community and stay relevant we need to be innovative. And this sense of innovativeness involves scanning within our ambience for the problems that need to be solved.

So why Yukuwallet?

I will explain it. When we opened up Yukudemy E-learning for the general public – That’s when Yukudemy became an Open E-learning Platform –Many instructor’s published their pieces of training, and they have continued to publish.

The business model was simple. When you publish a premium course and someone purchases it, you part with 60% and Yukudemy takes 40%.

Primordially, we had to manually offset and pay these instructors. This was hectic! One had to keep every record about the payments to know the balances and hold up with the accounts.

This somewhat inhibited creative marketing amongst instructors as they (instructors) had no control over their finances and accounts. This rooted some dissatisfaction amongst some instructors, and it befell on us.

Trust issues especially from those instructors who were not making great sales crept in.

Second problem: some learners started raising concerns about our payment model. They would ask to pay for a given course in bits. This became rampant during the Covid season most amongst secondary school students. They were home and life was whimsically harder to pay for a course all the way once.

Yukuwallet was designed and developed to address these challenges and age from that angle.

The current features that may prove of importance to you.

Before I even list them, it’s important to sound a warning to the reader – for the features, how you choose to use them may be slightly different from the use cases that I have indited in here. Therefore, read the features with an open mind. And in any case that you figure out a better use case please don’t forget to write it in comments; otherwise, I will not hassle any forgiveness.

Okay, let’s dive in.

Wallet – Payment collection (Deposits & Withdraws).

As I hinted in the prefixes of this article, the priority was to allow the Yukudemy E-learning Platform instructors to collect their monies from the sale of their courses over time and be able to choose to withdraw such cumulative sum at any time of their wish.

Therefore, as a Yukudemy instructor, you need to know the following.

When someone (a Yukudemian) purchases your course, your earning (which is 60%) will get deposited to your Yukuwallet after 48 hours. This also implies that if the buyer doesn’t raise issues within 48 hours then it will be difficult to refund the money.

This earning happens automatically and as an instructor, you can check it out in the section of deposits. You can search your course earnings using the keyword “course sale”. You can also go ahead to sort by clicking on the triangular arrows that are vertically positioned.

You can choose to withdraw your money. Currently, (as I write) you can only withdraw to Mobile Money Uganda. This shouldn’t be a great concern since the majority of the premium courses published are owned by Ugandans. However, this is a temporary limitation, and will be resolved sooner as I later hint in “the Future of Yukuwallet”.

To withdraw your available balance, simply access the side menu and select ‘Withdraws’ and up from the stats bar, tap on ‘New withdraw’ and from there, follow the prompts.

Deposit some money for later use (Deposits, Withdraws, and purchases)

With Yukuwallet, you can top up your balances. This important especially for students who want to save some money and later use it purchase courses.

Deposit happens the same way someone buys a course at the Yukudemy E-learning Platform. The only differences are that in Yukuwallet you can choose a different currency; meanwhile, in the Yukudemy E-learning platform, Yukudemy will only be allowed to pay in your home currency that you select during the process of confirming your Yukudemy account.

This also means that if you would want to purchase a given course using a different currency other than the one you chose during account confirmation, then first deposit it in Yukuwallet before you purchase. This is common especially if you traveled out of your home country.

In Yukuwallet, you get to choose the amount that you want to deposit, unlike in the Yukudemy E-learning Platform where prices are preset.

The third difference is of course obvious. Your deposits go as a balance top-up in your wallet; meanwhile, your course purchases get deposited in the instructor’s wallet and also the Yukudemy’s wallet (the 40%).

Your account top-up is added to balance. Now you must get to understand the difference between Balance and Available balance!

Balance is simply the whole balance left in your wallet. Meanwhile, Available balance is the sum of money that has matured. So what’s a mature balance?

Let’s take a step and talk about some accounting. There’s a term ‘Ledger balance’. Ledger balance is simply the money that you cannot withdraw. It’s that sum of money that is still being processed. For the case of Yukuwallet, take a scenario where you paid using a Visa card. Our partners will have to process this money and move it to us before we can allow you to withdraw it.

To put Ledger balance in simple terms, it’s that balance that’s yet being exchanged with our partners. Once we get done with the transactions and we receive the money then your balance will have matured and it will be pushed to Available balance.

Therefore;

Balance = Available balance + Ledger balance

Your ledger balance takes about 48 hours to mature.

You can withdraw back your available balance. Currently, as I said, we only allow withdraws in Mobile Mobile Ug – Though you can deposit using any currency.

Withdraw fee charge is 2% + 500. Therefore, if you were withdrawing UGX 10,000.00, your fee charge will be UGX 710.

Purchase something

As I write, you can now use your Balance to purchase courses.

We already integrated Yukuwallet into the Yukudemy E-learning Platform. You can go ahead to use your Yukuwallet balance to purchase a course.

It’s important to note that, you can use your Ledger balance to purchase a course without waiting for it to mature.

Note that you can see the products that you purchased by clicking on the eye icon.

Transfer some money (Transfers)

With the current Yukuwallet, you can transfer money from your wallet to another Yukudemian's wallet.

The transfer fee charge is just 0.5%. Meaning, if you were transferring UGX 10,000 to your daughter so that she can buy herself some chemistry courses; then, you will be charged a fee of UGX 50.

Or if you happened to go to America and you want to send a birthday gift to your fiance in Uganda – USD 82 – Approximately UGX 300,000. Then you are charged a transfer fee of USD 0.41 – Approximately UGX 1,500.

It’s important to note the following.

To transfer money from your wallet to another Yukudemians wallet, all you need to know is the receiver's email. And this should be the email that he or she is using with Yukudemy.

To transfer simply go to 'transfer' and tap on 'New transfer'. From there enter your receiver's email. Once Yukuwallet finds the wallet you can proceed with sending the money to the recipient.

By default, every Yukudemian has a diurnal transfer limit. This is a daily limit. For example for the UGX wallet, the transfer limit is UGX 300,000 per day. I have tabulated the limits in the table below.

The future of Yukuwallet

The future is difficult to predict most especially when it comes to products. We have already had our surprises about Yukuwallet. For example, many Yukudemains have used Yukuwallet to save money which was not what we originally anticipated. This category of users has gone ahead to request for what we have internally called black-box. Black-box is of course an interesting feature; however, I won't talk about it since it's still under consideration.

That said, as the Lead Designer of Yukudemy family of applications, I will talk about the near future of Yukuwallet. Things that will happen within two to four months.

Transfer Limit

As I mentioned above, by default transfers have maximum limits per day. This applies to everyone who has a Yukudemy account. The Yukuwallet engineering team is currently working on the feature that will allow the extension of this limit.

To extend your transfer limit, then you will have to apply and submit some documents such as National ID. This process is called Know Your Customer (KYC).

KYC is a process of verifying the identity of your customers. We already do some KYU when you create an account with Yukudemy by collecting your names, emails, phone number (optional), etc. We also have the second layer of KYU for Yukudemy E-learning Platform instructors: instructors apply and their accounts get approved for them to have access and privilege to use Instructor features in the E-learning platform.

Similarly, the Yukuwallet team thinks it befits to know more details about the Yukudemian who wants to transfer more money.

Once your account gets approved for Classic transfers, you will be able to transfer money without a maximum limit.

Yuku Village Clients

The Yuku village team requested that Yukuwallet be integrated with their clients' websites so that they can easily receive money in the form of donations and sales. This means that sooner Yukuwallet will have merchants account. And you will be able to purchase or donate to these clients using your Yukuwallet Balance.

This will help Yuku village clients a lot. Historically, the Yuku Village team used to integrate Flutterwave directly to these websites. But these clients found it harder to manage their flutterwave accounts to the level that some had to employ IT specialists to handle for them that. And this increased the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the website.

Whether this merchant account will be opened up for other businesses other than Yuku Village clients is still under consideration.

Yukusite and Yukusite Poem

The Yukusite team is planning to introduce premium articles and poems. And it has already solidified that Yukusite will be integrated with Yukuwallet for subscriptions to premium eyries. First, the author will be able to collect their earnings in their wallet and later on decide to withdraw such money.

And it will also be equally good cause to allow any Yukudemians to use their Yukuwallet balance to pay for premium eyries and poems.

Other future apps

Any other future app that we might introduce will likely be able to use Yukuwallet, especially if such an app involves payment.

Conclusion

This release note was written three months after the release of Yukuwallet, and We greatly apologize for that delay. Though I strongly believe that this timing is better: allowing us to talk about several features.

If you have anything of concern that you would like clarifications on, raise it in comments. You can also make suggestions.