18. What the new customer wants:
•Solid Performance
•Affordability
•Interoperability
•Convenience & Simplicity
•Trust
•Support, here and now
Editor's Notes
Digital payments are great.
Imagine if you could pay for everything using your phone.
Sending money, paying bills, buying soda at the neighborhood shop.
But this is not happening….
Something is askew…..
Let’s look at some numbers..
We have 400 million internet connections in Africa
Internet is no longer a luxury.
Penetration is not very high but this is a good place to start
We have 1 billion people in Africa
We do not lack numbers
We have 1 billion devices in Africa
We have the fastest growth in mobile subscribers in the world
But payments are still not taking off as they should all over the continent
Save for a few cases of success, like MPESA here in Kenya, most African consumers do not use digital payments.
What’s wrong? It’s the people and how we relate with them, not the numbers of devices or connections.
So Let’s find out what the customer really wants.
Let’s rethink the customers’ needs.
Instead of building for ourselves, let’s build for the customer.
This is what we are building.
This is what we think we are building
This is what the customer wants
The customer wants solid performance.
She wants payments to work as promised. No breaking, no downtime.
Do not underestimate the importance of impeccable performance.
Center your proposition on the benefits and performance you offer.
Affordability is often ignored especially in mobile money payments.
The amounts charged for transfers are discouraging for merchant payments.
Imagine someone trying to pay for a liter of kerosene or maybe even a soda at the neighborhood shop.
They will be charged more than the price of that soda
We have too many disjointed and fragmented payment systems in our markets.
Imagine if we had a centralized platform that just worked without any hassles.
We need to be able to make payments wherever we want to regardless of the service provider.
This is one of the biggest challenges of mobile money growth.
And it is critical if we are going to get all customers interested in what we are doing.
The simpler the payments platform, the more it will be adopted and used.
Imagine PUST TO PAY.
Someone will soon come up with a payment so simple that you just click one button.
It is vital to build consumer trust.
Create initial trust by the way you engage with the ustomer.
They like to see security in place. Biometrics on an app would be amazing.
The consumer has to be willing to use your payment platform for you to succeed.
And consumers will not use digital channels if they cannot trust them.
Focus on real time confirmation of transactions.
Customers want support to be provided instantly. As quickly as it would take them to make a cup of instant coffee.
Customer self service is a fantastic way to reduce support queries.
In conclusion, whatever payment system or platform you build, make sure you have these 6 items locked down.
Thank you.