April 4, 2014
ITS NOT THAT COMPLICATED
I was lucky to have worked on M-PESA, Lucky to have worked with Vodafone and Sagentia team, I am lucky to have worked for Glo in the Mobile Money Department, Lucky to have worked with Kabira Team now Tibco, Lucky to have interacted with Gemalto all the while, Lucky to have worked with Fortis Mobile Money, Cellulant, Sterling Bank, EFina, Central Bank of Nigeria, Comviva and Airtel Money, Ezee Money kenya, Iceni and Bank of Khartoum and more importantly worked with Angie and Abbie in my Company Red Ant. I can only say that I have seen all the Mobile payments around and about.
Through all this bounty of luck,I have met amazing people, encountered amazing challenges and learnt so much to last me my lifetime.
Through it all I have learnt what works, what can work and what will not work. But all I can say is that Mobile payments or any payments deployment is not as complicated as you think. Remember the end user is a customer who owns a mobile phone which most probably is not android or Blackberry.
You have got to think before you plunge in the payment arena most importantly keep it simple. Bill Gates and others are successful because they made it simple. M-PESA kept it simple. All successful inventions aimed at the common man are always simple. You identify a need, find a solution and keep it simple and most important listen to great advice.
I have seen companies sink deep in this payment industry by doing what they should never have even started. Employing 10 directors to run your mobile payment is a load of foolishness.
Lets have a look at how M-PESA was made
Vodafone contracts Sagentia, Sagentia develop the system, vodafone sends a project Manager to Kenya to pilot, Project Manager ( Susie) gets one more person ( me) from Safaricom. Safaricom supports us and gives me and Susie two chairs and a corner to run our business. Pilot runs successfuly, Pilot closes, launch preparations, still Me and Susie in Kenya, A team in UK sagentia and Vodafone supervision.
A Key Accounts manager and product developer for kenya side is hired, an operations manager and a hod, Two trainers from safaricom call center…. Launch.
Team had like 10 chairs and a small corner open office.
Thats all you need folks.. a small team, a great platform and a passion to drive the service to the people.
Hopefully you will relook your resource and realign. Stop trying fitting a square peg in a round hole… just start afresh.
Have a financially included day!
Hi Karimi. I was looking on the Internet for mobile payment deployment and found your blog, which I find very very interesting. I'm actually working at a company in Mexico that is trying a similar model as MPESA in Kenya and I would love to talk to you about your experience. I saw this is you last post and it's from April last year, so Im really hoping you get to see this comment. Hopefully you can share some of your experience with me :). My email is erivillarreal@hotmail.com, please if you see this message, perhaps we can talk? I've read some of your posts and find them quite fascinating.