As most in the payments space are aware, the concept of mobilizing financial services has been around for many years now, and even successfully deployed in some key markets around the world (Safaricom’s M-Pesa service in Kenya being the most notable). The dramatic uptake in mobile phone usage the past few years, particularly in consumer markets that are largely “unbanked”, has spurred renewed interest on the part of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to investigate the introduction of such services, and has also opened the door to a wide spectrum of suppliers who believe their technology can service the requirements of the industry. While opinions vary on where we are at in the product lifecycle of mobile financial services to both unbanked and banked demographics, what seems abundantly clear on the supplier side of the industry is that this opportunity is quite possibly the biggest land grab going in the payments space in recent past. The buzz and interest with this opportunity is reminiscent of the ERP glory days of the late ‘90s when the fear of the Y2K bug was omnipresent, and corporations of all sizes were upgrading their management information systems.
With the number of technology participants that filled the exhibit hall, each offering the same types of solutions on the surface, I can’t help but think how any MNO embarking upon a solution evaluation process might be challenged with the solution providers to even include in their list of ones to look at. As most MNOs will realize early on, there is a significant difference between those providers that simply offer a slick mobile application, to those who provide a robust underlying financial services technology platform, to those who bring with them the operational expertise to guide and support the operator in such a capacity once the service is “live”. The list of viable technology partners out there becomes even more narrow in cases where the financial services model requires sophisticated transaction settlement either between financial service partners (such as partner banks), or other 3rd party settlement networks.
These types of solution differentiators also became glaringly apparent in a recent meeting with a large regional MNO. After spending the best part of a day in a detailed collaborative session on payments with the project team, at the end of it they came to the collective realization that what they are about to embark on has more to do with financial services than it had to do with “mobile specifically”. As a technology provider that has been delivering payment solutions and infrastructure in the Financial Services industry for as long as hyperWALLET has, it really highlighted the importance and value this background brings to customers who are going down this path for the very first time.
