Anton Potgieter, founder of TelePassport and a former CEO of Huge Group, has a new venture in the telecommunications space. Called Trabel, the Cape Town-based company has developed Scotty BusinessLine, an app and service he said will “reinvent business calls on cellphones”.

Scotty BusinessLine provides “a second or business telephone line on your mobile phone”, Potgieter said.

“Historically, making business calls from a cellphone has had several inherent failings: the telephone number shown is not a company number, which can look unprofessional, the call is not automatically charged to the company account and requires reimbursement (via tax inefficient “cell allowances”, or admin-intensive manual claim forms), and possibly the most important, the company gets no record of the business numbers that are being called on its behalf,” he explained.

Scotty is an Android app — iOS is coming soon — that gives users their own Scotty telephone number (in the 087 range) from which they can make or receive calls at a flat rate of 79c/minute.

The app replaces users’ default Android phone dialler and allows them to make calls through either their Sim card or through their Scotty number, using a choice of two separate dial-out buttons.

Calls made from the “Scotty” button are made from the Scotty phone number and they use neither the phone’s Sim card airtime or data. Instead, these are billed to the Scotty account. The technology Trabel uses is known as “seamless callback”.

In the podcast, Potgieter explains why he started Trabel and launched Scotty BusinessLine, and why he believes there is huge demand for such a solution in South Africa.

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