Talk360, a South African startup has closed a $4 million seed funding round led by HAVAIC, a venture capital and advisory firm based in Cape Town, South Africa. Other investors include Gaston Aussems (ex-Mollie), Robert Kraal (ex-Adyen), Gabriel de Montessuss (President WorldPay International) and Marnix van der Ploeg (ex-Booking.com and EQT).

Talk360 offers an international calling app that allows reliable and affordable phone calls to any offline landline or mobile phone in the world. It is a simple app that helps people call their friends, reach out to their family, and speak with their loved ones over the phone. Only the initiator of the call needs a smartphone, the calling app and internet to make calls.

But besides this, the company is on a mission to solve a huge friction in African markets. Talk360 is working to create a new payment platform that will integrate all available payment options across Africa. This will trim the number of service providers that companies operating in Africa will onboard to cater for the unique preferences emanating from the continent’s diversity.

According to Talk360, the product will open up businesses to the largest pool of localized payment options in Africa. The company plans to use the newly raised fund to expand its call business across the African continent.

With existing partnerships with agents like PesaPoint in Kenya and Flash in South Africa, Talk360 enables users to purchase airtime vouchers from a network of over 750,000 physical points of sale. South Africa, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are among its biggest markets. Talk360 co-founder and managing director for Africa Dean Hiine told TechCrunch he anticipates great growth for its payment platform, which he says will also make it easy for international merchants to sell to users in Africa too. He added that the startup decided to build its own payment platform informed by the need to make payment and checkout easy for its users in Africa.

According to Hiine, the plan is to integrate different payment systems. He says his new platform will bring all the “scattered payment methods” across Africa on a common platform, which he believes will positively impact Talk360’s bottom line, and that of other merchants that will use its platform.

“In our calling business we identified some unique problems around digital payment in Africa. The payment methods are scattered and payment processes are lengthy…And we could see that this problem had a serious impact on our bottom line in terms of conversion rate we were seeing in Africa…It is a problem we experienced and we are trying to solve for other merchants with a presence in the continent too by making the process fast and easy,” said Hiine.

“We are building the platform to actually increase our conversion rate by giving the user experience one single checkout, and to some level, offer predictive analysis– to tell the preferred methods of payment for that region and offer them as top options for the user,” said Hiine.

Since it was co-founded in 2016 by Hiine, Hans Osnabrugge, and Jorne Schamp, Talk360 has grown to be in use in 170 countries, connecting 2 million people in 2021. The current model, which was born from the need to compete with internet calls powered by social media platforms such as WhatsApp, has seen Talk360 pitching its tent in many markets across the globe. This means, setting up a hub in markets in East and South Africa.

The app was previously designed to help people on foreign trips beat roaming.

Passing off is a claim in common law that another person is making some false and intentional misrepresentation likely to induce people to believe that his goods or services are those of yours or endorsed by you or connected to you. 

The principle of Passing off seeks to protect the goodwill or reputation of a person and it seeks to prevent others from deceiving the public that the person has endorsed the goods or is related to the goods in order to benefit or have a free ride on that person’s goodwill: Goodwill is a form of legal property that can be protected hence the reason for the common law remedy under passing off for the aggrieved against the defendant. 

Passing off goes hand in hand with the intellectual property rights claim of trademark infringement. According to Section 3 of the Trademark Acts, the claim for damages for infringement of trademark rights can only be brought only by a person who has properly registered the trademark and certificate of trademark obtained but a person whose trademark is unregistered can seek redress under the common law of economic tort of passing off.

Section 3 of the Trademark Act provides thus:

No person shall be entitled to institute any proceeding to prevent, or to recover damages for, the infringement of an unregistered trademark; but nothing in this Act shall be taken to affect rights of action against any person for passing off goods as the goods of another person or the remedies in respect thereof.

To this effect, the Trademark act re-emphasized that though a person who has not registered a trademark cannot bring an action for trademark infringement but the aggrieved person can bring an action under common law for passing off against the defendant. 

Therefore, an action for passing off can come as a common law remedy when an aggrieved person did not register the trademark that has been infringed. 

However, for an aggrieved person to successfully maintain an action for the economic tort of passing off, the aggrieved person must successfully prove these three ingredients to the satisfaction of the court. 

They include; He must prove that: 

1. He has “goodwill” or a reputation that spanned off his status or class. 
2. that there is a false and intentional misrepresentation by the defendant. 
3. Finally, he must prove that he has suffered or is likely to suffer damages by the reason of the misrepresentation by the defendant.

In conclusion, in this period that “trademark” is trending in Nigeria due to some trademark infringement legal brawl, it is pertinent to bring it to the attention of readers that there’s an action called passing off and it goes hand in hand with trademark rights. Passing off is an action brought for damages and to get seek an injunction to stop a person from making some false representation likely to induce people to believe that the goods or services are those of the plaintiff or connected to his person or brand and a person can resort to action for passing off instead of an action for trademark theft or infringement if the person has no registered trademark.