TALKING
‘‘ business
We won ’ t wake up tomorrow and suddenly find that everyone has an e-wallet and is transacting digitally on every platform .
the past 12 months . Then , imagine the hundreds of thousands of merchants out there who only accept digital forms of payment and who would previously have had no access to these Mukuru customers , who prior to Mukuru would have had no way of transacting with them .
Now , the dual-sided network effect is when a platform such as ours has all these customers that can integrate into all these merchants : we can facilitate payment linkages between them such that the merchants now have millions of customers they ’ ve never spoken to and all these customers now have access to an array of offerings they were previously excluded from , such as sneakers from Takealot or profiles on Netflix .
This is what we mean by digital and financial inclusion , because previously they may well have had the new smartphone , but they were not part of the digital ecosystem .
Partnerships
Partnerships will become even more important , and we ’ re certainly seeing more businesses partnering with like-minded companies to either combine a platform that has customers with particular products , or vice versa . Partnerships lean on the respective strengths of each platform or business and provide access to an array of new customers . All partnerships need to be pursued to meet real and pressing needs of customers .
Agility
Agility is a term that is bandied about nowadays , but for a FinTech to be successful it needs to be built into the company ’ s DNA . There are spectacular high-profile failures and start-ups that perhaps don ’ t gain the traction they expected . In most cases this arises from developing a shiny solution , and then waiting for the market to come to you . It is vital to listen to what the customers want and then anticipate how that will drive a shift in customer behaviour so that you can grow into that space and stay relevant . This means development cycles are quicker as companies use more and more sophisticated means of communicating and listening to their customers . p
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