New payment avenues for the unbanked and without-card population are vital for the financial ecosystem nowadays, says Gaurav Mittal, Regional Director, South Asia, MatchMove, in conversation with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN)
What role does MatchMove play in the payments systems?
MatchMove Pay is Singapore’s fastest growing technology company, providing innovative enterprise solutions to help businesses increase revenue, user engagement and loyalty through the strategic use of our customisable cloud-based platforms.
In 2014, we launched the MatchMove Wallet, Asia’s rst mobile payment card, in partnership with the American Express. “The MatchMove Wallet is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables any major consumer brands, banks, telcos and regional eCommerce sites to easily issue secure mobile payment cards to reach millions of potential shoppers with smartphones in Asia and emerging markets. “The platform also supports other major networks like MasterCard, Visa, Union Pay and JCB.
MatchMove Pay has been consistently recognised internationally for its outstanding innovation. We defeated a strong line-up of 14 other nalists to emerge as “Top Innovator” in the highly competitive global ntech competition, SWIFT Innotribe Startup Challenge at SIBOS in Boston. “The company was also ranked as Singapore’s fastest-growing technology company in Southeast Asia in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacic in 2013 and also awarded the Red Herring Top 100 Asia and Red Herring 100 Global in 2012.
How has technology helped integrated development in the ecosystem of MatchMove?
Customers who are in the ecosystem of MatchMove are enjoying rapid growth and expansion in their business as the ecosystem is providing them a new payment avenue for the uncarded and unbanked population.
How would you describe your presence in the Indian market, especially with regard to public and private enterprises?
MatchMove’s presence is made possible with the valuable partnership with Yes Bank. With our integrated end-to-end payment technology and working opportunities via Yes Bank, MatchMove is able to provide prepaid cards solutions to various industries such as eCommerce and tourism, among others.
As an online wallet service provider, what challenges do you face from telecom service providers?
Evolution of digital technology has created a positive impact and also challenges various industries. Some of the major challenges faced by larger telecom service providers are in terms of time, data and cost.
In this digital era, time is one of the most essential factors for companies launching a new product or service to their customers. Open, larger telcom service providers have complex legacy architectures and systems which will result in additional time when developing new products or services for their customers. Hence, telecoms are exploring ways to expedite the process by working with reliable partners who can deliver a working product within a shorter time frame; a system that can help to monetise the mountains of data that how through their networks. With the huge amount of valuable data collected, telcos wanted to make the best out of it to get insights for both business and marketing decisions, controlling cost while being able to deliver latest product to customers. “is will happen by developing or subscribing to scalable services with vendors or partners and can denitely help manage future costs, since operators will be able to react rapidly to market changes.
Who are your key market competitors?What strategy do you adopt to keep ahead of your market competitors?
Banks and payment companies like Alibaba are our competitors. We aim to deliver the most updated technology with quality to our customers within a shorter time frame. This is achieved by our committed stat who are constantly improving our internal systems to ensure a full and scalable platform, which can be customised easily according to customers’ requirements.
The Government of India has announced Digital India – a Rs. 2.50 lakh-crore eGovernance initiative for 2015-2019. Can you share your readiness and strategy for this programme?
Focusing on one of the most critical themes – Digital Wallet, MatchMove aims to partner with various service providers and banks to bridge the gap between unbanked population and payment services. Leveraging on MatchMove’s s mobile wallet platform, which is running on secured PCI-DSS Level 1 Version 3.0 platform with numerous enhanced security features, it will drive a new payment avenue for the uncarded and unbanked population to be able to make online payments. With the convenience of enabling the uncarded and unbanked population to shop and pay online, eCommerce merchants will also benet from this newly- added revenue.
Could you brief us about MatchMove’s upcoming projects and future moves in the pipeline?
Indian market will be MatchMove’s main focus this year. With India’s population of 1.2 billion and only 250 million bank accounts, there are tremendous opportunities for MatchMove to continue driving mobile payment solutions for the uncharted and unbanked population. Apart from India, MatchMove is also in talks with a few potential partners in Europe and South Africa to seal o“ partnerships where we can introduce our sophisticated mobile wallet platform to drive a new payment avenue for the uncarded and unbanked population in other parts of the world.